Do you believe in repressed memories?

Wikipedia defines “repressed memory” as “a theoretical concept used to describe a significant memory, usually of a traumatic nature, that has become unavailable for recall…in which a subject blocks out painful or traumatic times in one’s life. This is not the same as amnesia, which is a term for any instance in which memories are either not stored in the first place (such as with traumatic head injuries when short term memory does not transfer to long term memory) or forgotten.”

Beginning in the early 1990s, a litany of court cases were brought to trial based on evidence based (in some cases exclusively) on repressed memories. In 1991, George Franklin was convicted of murder based solely on his daughter’s eyewitness testimony. She claimed to have repressed the memory of watching her father rape and murder her childhood friend for about twenty years and then recovered it upon entering therapy in her late 20s.

Following this trial, in thousands of civil cases (and later criminal cases), family members were accused of childhood sexual abuse and bizarre, horrific Satanic ritual abuse that the plaintiff claimed to have had absolutely no memory of until many years years later.

Since then, organizations such as the False Memory Syndrome Foundation have arisen, arguing that these repressed memories are not in fact repressed memories for real events, but are created by the power of suggestion, mostly by questionable therapeutic techniques.

No scientific evidence corroborates the existence of these repressed memories, and even its strongest proponents agree that there is no way to distinguish between an allegedly real repressed memory versus an imagined memory created by the power of suggestion. The idea of a repressed memory is unsupported by neuroscientists’ current understanding of memory as a psychological or physiological construct.

Do you have any experience with repressed memory? Based on the evidence, do you think these lawsuits have merit? Do you think there’s evidence that repressed memories are a real phenomenon, or do you think they’re created by the power of suggestion?