According to well-known psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, "in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish." (as quoted in Yount, p. 56) Needless to say, Freud believed that long-term memories were permanent. However, he was well aware of the fact that we feel that we are unable to retrieved all of this information.

Besides believing in reconstructed memories , Freud believed that the human mind repressed bad memories subconsciously to protect the individual. When memories are suppressed , they can be remembered with effort and sufficient cues. Repressed memories , on the other hand, cannot be remembered by conventional strategies or increasing cues. When a memory is repressed, the person is not consciously aware of the memory.

Recovered Memories

Sometimes adults will recover memories of being abused as a child. In some cases these memories are accurate, but in others they are distorted (reconstructed ) or wholly constructed. The problem is, as of yet, there is no reliable way to distinguish confabulations from accurate memories. (Stocks, 1998, p. 431)

 

Probably no one of these explanations of forgetting is completely correct. ("Memory (mental process)." 2000)It is likely that our bodies use each type of forgetting at different times. In some cases, we don't remember something, simply because we never did transfer the information from sensory memory to long-term memory! There are many factors that affect our ability to retain information.