Psychedelics and Recovered Memories

Abstract

In this exploratory study, we are interested to explore whether people who have used psychedelics have had experiences of recovering memories that they were unaware of prior to the use of psychedelics. The reason for this exploratory work comes from: 1) recent work showing that psychedelics led to the recovery of so-called dissociated memories (Peck et al., 2025). Dissociated (or repressed memories) are assumed to be unconscious memories of past trauma, are inaccessible and could perhaps be elicited with for example psychedelics, 2) anecdotal reports such as the book The Tell by Amy Griffin (https://www.thetellbook.com/) in which Amy described that the use of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy led to the recovery of a memory of childhood sexual abuse. Recovered memories can refer to authentic or non-experienced events. Although psychedelics have been reported to lead to memory-like and vivid experiences, and a sense of re-living which could be false (McGovern et al., 2024), it is unclear whether psychedelics can also lead to the recovery of memories of experienced events that happened a long time ago. The goal of the current study is to explore whether people who have used psychedelics report to have had experiences of such recovered memories.

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