Bumi shot a smile of glee to Ayana before sliding back into her much too close chair. Finally more permission to help! The pink-haired girl's eyes rolled back up as her lips rapidly moved, seeming to silently form hundreds of words a minute as she sat in thought. Suddenly Bumi's eyes refocused, immediately snapping out of her own mental catalogue to give guidance to her small friend. "Not exactly as uncommon as you'd think! Yep, yep. To some extent, this really does describe a lot of undiagnosed PTSD issues, in which victims often don't necessarily know exactly what's affecting their lives so much."
Bumi leaned forward, nearly touching her nose to Ayana's as she filled the girl's vision with her own eyes. "But that's not quite what you're thinking is it? Nope, nope. You want to real juicy psychology debates. And that answer is.... Complicated! The idea of genuine memory repression is actually a big component of Freudian psychology, which has had quite the rocky road over the years! Oh yes, yes it has. Memory research is actually very tricky, since like much in the case of Quantum Physics, our current methods to measure certain states inherently requires interacting with them in ways that affect the results."
The pink haired girl shot back, toppling over her chair and nearly sending herself flying back to the ground in the process. Stumbling back to her cart, she tossed a stream of books from the shelves until she at last arrived on what she needed. "I'm afraid if you want to know whether memory repression empirically exists, we'd be here all day going over case studies and still not have an answer friend. And not that I'd mind to, it's quite a fascinating topic, you seem like a girl on a mission." Bumi delivered a new book on the table with a thwack, immediately shooting her gaze back up to the brown-haired girl.
"Instead what might be helpful is a visit to the good ol' mother of all sciences, philosophy! And what better place to start than the one and only Republic! Yep, yep friend. And we don't even need to debate whether it was a satirical work! Nope, nope. We can skip right to the Myth of Er." The girl flipped open the book, rapidly paging to her necessary section. "You can read the full account yourself, but the way it relates to The Republic is in the theme of cycles. You see it is a supposed story by a man named Er, who was slain in battle and ends up in a conception of the afterlife in which souls either punished or rewarded for their sins or virtues in life. Quite a common theme in afterlife myths! But the catch is that after several days of this, the souls are lined up and forced into a lottery to choose what kind of life to be reborn into. I'll spare you the nitty-gritty details, there's many parables in this section, such a poor man who was rewarded for his virtue and chooses to be reborn as a powerful king, only to discover his new destiny had cursed him to eat his own children later in life! Quite a twist of fate! But the most important part to our discussion is the river of Lethe."
Bumi flipped a few more pages ahead, her eyes rolling up slightly as she automatically came to the where she needed. "In this mythology, Lethe, when drunk from, would cause the souls to forget their time in both their previous lives and afterlife, thus allowing them to be reborn. The idea that through no other change than the loss of memory, these souls would in effect become new beings, ready to be reborn, is actually quite profound. Now returning to your question friend-yep, yep, I haven't forgotten-while we don't know for sure, if we were to grant that repressed memories could exist, the real burning question is what conclusions we could draw from that. If the memory can not be accessed, can we consider this past self the same person? What underlying affects might be carried onto the current self? And most importantly, just what would cause the human mind to repress something?"
