disinterested in attempts to study repression in laboratory settings, they later came to reject them. They comment that while "the psychologists had criticized each other's researches largely on the grounds that their experimental techniques and laboratory controls had not been fully adequate, the psychoanalysts rejected them on the more sweeping grounds that whatever else these researches might be they simply were not investigations of repression." They relate that in 1934, when Freud was sent reprints of Rosenzweig's attempts to study repression, he responded with a dismissive letter stating that "the wealth of reliable observations" on which psychoanalytic assertions were based made them "independent of experimental verification." In the same letter, Freud concluded that Rosenzweig's studies "can do no harm." MacKinnon and Dukes describe Freud's conclusion as a "first rather casual opinion", and state that most psychoanalysts eventually adopted a contrary view, becoming convinced that "such studies could indeed be harmful since they misrepresented what psychoanalysts conceived repression to be." Writing in 1962, MacKinnon and Dukes state that experimental studies "conducted during the last decade" have largely abandoned the term "repression", choosing instead to refer to the phenomenon as "perceptual defense". They argue that this change of terminology has had a major effect on how the phenomenon is understood, and that psychoanalysts, who had attacked earlier studies of repression, did not criticize studies of perceptual defense in a similar fashion, instead neglecting them. They concluded by noting that psychologists remained divided in their view of repression, some regarding it as well-established, others as needing further evidence to support it, and still others finding it indefensible. A 2020 meta-analysis of 25 studies examined the evidence that active memory suppression actually leads to decreased memory. It was found that in people with a repressive coping strategy, the willful avoidance of remembering certain memory contents leads to a significant reduction in memory performance for these contents. In addition, healthy people were better able to do this than anxious or depressed people. These results indicate that forgetting induced by suppression is a hallmark of mental wellbeing. Repressed memories One of the issues Freud struggled with was the status of the childhood "memories" recovered from repression in his therapy. He concluded that "these scenes from infancy are not always true. Indeed, they are not true in the majority of cases, and in a few of them they are the direct opposite of the historical truth". Controversy