Susan Clancy joined the Harvard University psychology department as a graduate student in 1995. There she began to study memory and the idea of repressed memories due to trauma. The debate in this field was strong at the time, with many clinicians arguing that we repress memories to protect ourselves from trauma that would be too hard to bear. Many cognitive psychologists, on the other hand, argued that true trauma is almost never forgotten, and that memories brought up years later through hypnosis are most likely false.