Deliberate amnesia and/or repressing memories with hypnosis

[utsusemia]

Setting: Modern day Washington, DC with some slight wiggle room as to the technology because it involves a high-tech shadowy government organization that would have access to some cutting-edge experimental drugs

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Part 1/2

[hagar_972]

Hee, I just researched the hell out of something similar for a story of mine. (And I have the molecular bio background, which helps, and academic access to journals - finding the good works about hypnosis without it is next to impossible.)

"Repressed memories" is really the wrong keyword for what you want, by the way: this keyword will get you to works about adults (or teens) trying to recall things they repressed due to trauma, or spontaneously rediscovering seemingly traumatically-repressed memories. Not only does traumatic repression works very differently than what you want, but in nearly all cases of rediscovered repressed memories they've been discovered to be false and the result of (usually unintentional) suggestion. And yes, hypnotic recovery of repressed memories is way less effective than tv shows would lead us to believe.

On inducing amnesia (without tissue damage):

* It takes about six hours for a memory to consolidate. During this time, the creation of the memory can be interrupted in various ways. This is the opportunity window that U0126 and other interventions targets. So, correct: this won't help your character, despite being able to handwave a human-effective, safe intervention.

* Given appropriate conditions, memory reconsolidation ("opening" the memory and altering it, sometimes erasing it) is sometimes possible. However, this requires a high specificity of recall cues (which natural memories don't have), some truly unpleasant drugs and the original memories cannot be recreated.

* Posthypnotic amnesia is a regular feature in academic (thoroughly tested) hypnotic suggestibility assessment. What "suggestibility assessment" means is that this won't work for every person - to each person there's a suggestibility limit, and no matter how willing you are, you're just not going to go above that.

* Posthypnotic amnesia is fully reversible, because it doesn't touch the memories: it just makes the person really not want (on a subconscious level, paricularly if they've been told to forget that they've been given an amnesia suggestion) to recall the information. To reverse, the hypnotist needs to also plant a reversibility cue (a passphrase, basically). Once prompted with the reversibility cue, the subject gains full recall.