Analyses of learning and memory increasingly attempt to take account of clinical and experimental research on victims of amnesia. Most of this literature has focused on pathologies of memory associated with demonstrable brain lesions or the administration of centrally acting drugs. The functional amnesias are a collection of memory disorders instigated by processes that do not result in damage or injury to the brain but that do engender a marked increase in forgetting.

Amnesia in the Dissociative Disorders

One major category of functional amnesia occurs within the context of diagnosable psychopathology, especially the dramatic "Dissociative Disorders" listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) (4th edition) of the American Psychiatric Association. In current diagnostic nosology, this category includes a wide variety of syndromes whose common core is an alteration in consciousness affecting memory and identity.

In dissociative amnesia (also known as psychogenic amnesia, limited amnesia), the...