Part III – The Psychology of Amnesia [Updated on 26 Sept 2025]

Freud: The Mercy of Repression

Forgetting is not merely an inconvenience of the mind; it is often its most vital defence. Freud was the first to articulate this systematically. In his model, the psyche banishes unbearable truths into the unconscious. Forgetting is repression – a way of keeping the self intact by walling off memories that threaten to undo it. Dreams, slips of the tongue, and neuroses leak what cannot be wholly contained. For Freud, memory was less a library than a battlefield.

Jung: Archetypes and the Collective Memory

Jung expanded the map. Beyond the personal unconscious, he discerned the collective unconscious – an immense reservoir of archetypes and inherited memory. What slips out of personal awareness may resurface as symbol, myth, or synchronicity. In Jung’s hands, forgetting was never complete; it was the mask behind which ancient patterns bide their time, waiting to re-emerge.

Modern psychology has confirmed both intuitions. Trauma studies show that dissociation and amnesia are not failures but survival strategies: the mind numbs itself, seals off unbearable chapters, and lets the body keep breathing. Neuroscience adds another dimension: the brain prunes synapses, deletes connections, and rewrites itself constantly. Forgetting is, paradoxically, the condition for functioning.

Katherine Solomon, in Dan Brown’s The Secret of Secrets, extends this into the terrain of neurology. She notes how anomalies – epilepsy, head injury, near-death experience – can unlock extraordinary states. Patients with temporal lobe epilepsy report visions of light and union with the divine. Sudden savant syndrome bestows unearned genius in art or mathematics after trauma. For Katherine, these cases suggest that the brain does not produce consciousness but filters it. When the filter falters, more of the broadcast arrives than usual.

Ancient India had already named this. Ayurveda described epilepsy as apasmāra – literally “loss of memory.” The Charaka Saṃhitā and Suśruta Saṃhitā list its signs with clinical precision: sudden collapse, convulsions, frothing at the mouth, followed by confusion and exhaustion. Treatments involved herbs, oils, and mantras, balancing the humours and calming the disturbed mind. But mythology deepened the meaning.

In Śaiva tradition, Apasmāra Puruṣa is the dwarf demon of ignorance, trampled under the foot of Naṭarāja, Śhiva the cosmic dancer. He cannot be killed, for ignorance cannot be annihilated – it is part of the human condition – but he must be subdued. If Śhiva were to lift his foot, consciousness itself would collapse into disorder. Epilepsy, ignorance, forgetfulness: all are kept in check, but never fully erased.

In this, Katherine’s neurology and India’s mythology meet. Both see seizures not as mere malfunctions but as breaches – cracks in the vessel where other realities seep through. For Katherine, the brain is a receiver, and when damaged, it lets in more of the broadcast. For India, apasmāra is the demon who will never vanish, only restrained by divine rhythm.

What unites them is the recognition that memory and forgetting are not opposites, but partners. Repression, dissociation, pruning, seizures – each reveals that our hold on awareness is tenuous, fragile, and porous. And yet, the cord remains. Even when the vessel convulses, the signal hums beneath, carried unseen. Forgetting is not failure but necessity, and sometimes – when the filter slips – revelation.