Taking the middle stance in the debate on the nature of traumatic memories

The discussion on the degree of similarity and continuity between more neutral memories and genuine traumatic memories lies at the core of the (at times too heated) debate on the possibility vs impossibility of having declarative memories for traumatic personal events. As an exercise in some of my classes, students had to themselves debate the issue taking documented opposite stances in whether traumatic memories can be declarative, whether trauma involves amnesia or involves the creation of false memories. The starting point of this exercise is an agreed evidence-based definition of trauma. As in the students’ exercise, in this paper we will first discuss the problems in current definitions of trauma and present a possible operational definition that narrows its boundaries. We will then examine similarities and differences in phenomenology and cognitive/physiological processes between memories for traumatic and non-traumatic personal experiences, and the possibility to have false memories for them. The conclusion is that there are some genuine specificities in the nature of traumatic memories, due mainly to the physiological processes involved in encoding, but also many common processes that help assimilate traumatic memories to a substantial degree to non-traumatic memories.