Question:
I wonder if Mr. Newton might tell us what he means by 'traumatic amnesia'? What happens after a blow to the head? Fugue states? Dissociation? Cultabuse? Repressed memories?

At least he could say what he means by the trauma referred to, because the theoretical construct of 'traumatic amnesia' in the context of recovered memories' is by no means accepted throughout the 'mental health community'; nor has it achieved consensus among reserachers into memory.

It's not that I would ever doubt your word, Mr. Newton, but given your history of manufacturing quotations and falsely attributing positions to others (e.g. FBI Agent Ken Lanning), would you be willing to provide a citation to a post where "Absolutist Kenny... insists that [traumatic amnesia] can never happen under any circumstances"? If not, I'll understand. All too well.

But could you at least clarify whether by "traumatic" you mean the physical trauma of, for instance, a blow to the head causing a concussion and thus amnesia, or the emotional trauma of an event?"Trauma", like "shock", is used in various ways, so it's ambiguous.(I don't remember the "trauma" of my birth, or of surgery under total anesthesia -- unlike those who claim to have "recovered" memories of being an egg stuck in a Fallopian tube -- but these gaps in memory are not due to "repressing" memory; the memories were never recorded in the first place, and any "recovery" of them would be spurious.) Likewise, by "amnesia" do you mean the forgetting of details and single occasions, or "massive repression in which years of traumatic events were completely blocked from consciousness"?

Answer: Traumatic amnesia" has a clear and specific original meaning, referring to gaps in memory caused by physical trauma (injury) to the brain's tissue. In this sense, it is well known and agreed upon. The problem is that it has been appropriated as, in Mr. Scherk's phrase, "the latest buzzword" for what had been called "repressed memory" or "dissociated memory" (gaps in memory due to psychological rather than physical causes); another slick name-change from the advocates of "Recovered Memory Therapy" -- which likewise changed its name when discredited, to "Repressed Memory Therapy", then "Dissociated Memory Therapy", and who knows what they will call it next week....

The vagueness Mr. Scherk noted in the word "amnesia" allows one specified type of amnesia (DSM-IV's 309.81 C(3) "inability to recall an important *aspect* of the trauma") to be taken as "massive repression in which years of traumatic events were completely blocked from consciousness" -- again the Fallacy of Ambiguity. Forgetting details of an event is not at all the same as forgetting the event ever occurred, let alone to the point that one is sure it did *not* occur (until prompted by hypnotherapy, the use of sodium amytal, or other suggestive techniques).