Repression Challenge:
On his website for his laboratory at Mclean (no longer available on the web), Harrison Pope posed the "repression challenge,” challenging anyone to find an example of repression and recovery before 1800, for $1,000. His criteria was incredibly narrow:
“To qualify as a bona fide case, the individual described in the work must:
1) experience a severe trauma (abuse, sexual assault, a near-death experience, etc.); and
2) develop amnesia for that trauma for months or years afterwards (i.e. be clearly unable to remember the traumatic event as opposed to merely denying or avoiding the thought); where
3) the amnesia cannot be explained by biological factors, such as a) early childhood amnesia -- in which the individual was under age five at the time of the trauma, or b) neurological impairment due to head injury, drug or alcohol intoxication, or biological diseases. Also, the individual must
4) "recover" the lost memory at some later time, even though the individual had previously been unable to access the memory.” [3]
Pope dismissed cases that he described as ‘ordinary forgetfulness’ and those which lacked specific details about the content of repressed memories. [4]

He published a paper that argued that the failure of anyone to find an example proved that repressed memory was a social construction. In this paper, he explicitly stated that his point would be disproved if anyone found an example and won the challenge [4]

However, someone did win the challenge: an opera from 1786 that specifically mentioned repression and recovery of memory was found. Instead of retracting his claim, Pope responded that he just “got the date wrong” and that repression was still socially constructed. [3]


The repression challenge and the resulting paper written by Pope were responded to by Goldsmith, Cheit, and Wood in an article titled “Ignoring Nina: Avoidance and Denial in Pope, Poliakoff, Parker, Boynes, and Hudson (2009).” In this article, the authors critique “the contest's methodological flaws,” Pope’s “illogical reasoning and conclusions concerning research studies on dissociative amnesia,” and his “absence of an explanation as to why their criteria for dissociative amnesia differ from those of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.” They note that even after Pope acknowledged the opera Nina, which won the repression challenge and disproved his paper’s conclusions, “[Pope] did not publish an addendum or retraction of their 2007 article.” [5]