Have you heard someone say online or in casual conversation, when responding to someone’s struggles, “well, the body keeps the score”?

For many people, this phrase is a useful way to name the physical toll stress and trauma can take when the body is in “fight or flight” mode.

The everyday use of this phrase also demonstrates the extraordinary reach of the 2014 non-fiction book that popularised it, The Body Keeps the Score by Dutch psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk. But as the idea has spread, it’s also been simplified.

In fact, this book – which has spent almost six years on The New York Times bestseller list – goes beyond arguing that trauma affects the body. It rests on a far more contentious claim: that traumatic memories live in the body, inaccessible to conscious memory.

This idea of repressed memories has a long and controversial history. Here’s why we’re worried it’s making a comeback.

During the 1990s, the idea of repressed memories sparked a major scientific dispute known as the “memory wars”. Clinicians and memory researchers disagreed over whether traumatic events could be completely inaccessible to conscious memory, only to be recovered later in therapy.

The core idea, rooted in psychoanalytic theory, was that traumatic experiences are so overwhelming that the mind unconsciously represses them as a defence mechanism, removing them from conscious awareness while they continue to produce psychological symptoms.

After more than a decade of research raising serious doubts about repression as a reliable........

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