Repressed memory, usually of a traumatic event, recalled during psychoanalytic therapy. The concept was developed by Freud, Sigmund in the early stages of his thinking about psychoanalysis, when he assumed that field desires must have some basis in fact, but because the events were disturbing to the individual the memory of them was buried in a place beyond recall (this is his so-called seduction theory). Freud quickly abandoned this theory when he realized that oedipal thoughts could be just as potent if they were imagined. The concept of recovered memory is controversial because there is significant evidence to suggest that in the majority of cases the so-called memories that are recalled are in fact phantasms of events that took place only in the unconscious.