Treatments in the past have attempted to alleve psychogenic amnesia by treating the mind itself, as guided by theories which range from notions such as betrayal theory to account for memory loss attributed to protracted abuse by caregivers to the amnesia as a form of self-punishment in a Freudian sense, with the obliteration of personal identity as an alternative to suicide.Treatment attempts often have revolved around trying to discover what traumatic event had caused the amnesia, and drugs such as intravenously administered barbiturates (often thought of as truth serum) were popular as treatment for psychogenic amnesia during World War II; benzodiazepines may have been substituted later. Truth serum drugs were thought to work by making a painful memory more tolerable when expressed through relieving the strength of an emotion attached to a memory. Under the influence of these truth drugs the patient would more readily talk about what had occurred to them. However, information elicited from patients under the influence of drugs such as barbiturates would be a mixture of truth and fantasy, and was thus not regarded as scientific in gathering accurate evidence for past events. Often treatment was aimed at treating the patient as a whole, and probably varied in practice in different places. Hypnosis was also popular as a means for gaining information from people about their past experiences, but like truth drugs really only served to lower the threshold of suggestibility so that the patient would speak easily but not necessarily truthfully.
Psychogenic amnesia or dissociative amnesia is a  memory disorder characterized by sudden retrograde episodic memory loss, said to occur for a period of time ranging from hours to years to decades. More recently, "dissociative amnesia" has been defined as a dissociative disorder "characterized by retrospectively reported memory gaps. These gaps involve an inability to recall personal information, usually of a traumatic or stressful nature." In a change from the DSM-IV to the DSM-5, dissociative fugue is now  subsumed under dissociative amnesia.The atypical clinical syndrome of the memory disorder (as opposed to organic amnesia) is that a person with psychogenic amnesia is profoundly unable to remember personal information about themselves; there is a lack of conscious self-knowledge which affects even simple self-knowledge, such as who they are. Psychogenic amnesia is distinguished from organic amnesia in that it is supposed to result from a nonorganic cause: no structural brain damage or brain lesion should be evident but some form of psychological stress should precipitate the amnesia, however psychogenic amnesia as a memory disorder is controversial. Definition
Psychogenic amnesia is the presence of retrograde amnesia (the inability to retrieve stored memories leading up to the onset of amnesia), and an absence of anterograde amnesia (the inability to form new long term memories). Access to episodic memory can be impeded, while the degree of impairment to short term memory, semantic memory and procedural memory is thought to vary among cases.