While the concept of repression has been around for a century, interest in this phenomenon has recently surged due to many prominent reports  of repressed memories of child sexual abuse.  The authenticity of these repressed memories is challenged by empirical studies that show that it is not at all hard to create false memories and that many recovered memories are actually the product of suggestion.
	Roediger and McDermott (2000) have shown that when participants are asked to learn a list of words, and another target word that is not on the list but is strongly associated with the learned words is presented, the subjects remember the non-presented target word over 50% of the time. On a recognition test, they remember it about 80% of the time–a memory illusion.
	While research clearly shows that memories can be created by suggestion, in cases of child sexual abuse memories, for example, this issue becomes quite emotionally charged. Some cases of recovered memories are authentic, and we don’t yet have adequate data to estimate what proportion of recovered memories of abuse are authentic and what proportion are not. Still, this controversy has helped inspire a great deal of research that has increased our understanding of just how fragile, fallible, malleable, and subjective human memory is.