Grab,
I'm doing research on illusions of memory in general and hindsight bias (also called: I knew it all along effect) in particular.

The theme you are alluding to has the potential to be very controversial. Yes, it very closely relates to the recovered memory debate.

Consensus? You'll never find a complete one whatever field you look at. But in recent years there has been a great progress in understanding and a lot of empirical research triggered by the political debate.

In my eyes, from the about a dozen books and (?)200 articles I have read, there is more or less a consensus among scientific researchers that what has been assumed with great personal conviction but no compelling scientific evidence by therapists to be true in the repressed memory debate happens either never (a minority of researchers) or extremely rarely (majority opinion).

The still non-consensul debate was between mainly the therapists on the one hand and the scientists on the other.

You could read the very blunt Robert A. Baker (Child sexual abuse and false memory syndrome) who puts it like this....far too many CPS workers, psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists et al., in their good-intentioned zeal to help...have, instead, done considerable harm...This must not be allowed to continue. We simply cannot afford or tolerate therapeutic incompetence.

You might read the nicer and among peers highly respected Elisabeth Loftus (with Katherine Ketcham, The Myth of Repressed Memory) whose opinion can be summarised as follows (from the book cover). ...there is absolutely no controlled scientific support for the idea that memories of trauma are routinely banished into the unconscious and then reliably recovered later..

Or the extremely good (but restricted in its theme) book by Stephen J. Ceci and Maggie Bruck, Jeopardy in the Courtroom. A Scientific Analysis of Children's Memory, if you want a middle of the road opinion. (on trauma theories, like the one paraphrased by Amos above) ...speculations that have no greater claim to scientific validation than the opposite claim that repression does not exist.

Looking back on those years it is depressing that e.g. such a bad and uninformed book like The Courage to Heal (Ellen Bass and Laura Davis) from the women self help scene had such a tremendous influence.

Wolfgang