The inaccessibility of traumatic memories

The inaccessibility of traumatic memories is a clinical possibility discussed by Sofia Zetterlund and a recurring pattern in the novel’s portrayal of recollection: an experience can remain beyond conscious access, then return indirectly or in fragments, without guaranteeing that every detail can be securely recovered. The idea connects the difficulty of remembering with the equally difficult task of deciding what a memory can establish.

Clinical Possibility and Its Limits

In conversation with Jeanette Kihlberg about Karl Lundström and Linnea Lundström, Sofia considers whether someone subjected to childhood sexual abuse might have no accessible memory of it. She answers that clinical practice and memory research support the possibility that very traumatic childhood events can be stored while remaining unavailable to conscious recall. The distinction matters: absence of a present memory, in Sofia’s account, does not by itself settle whether an event occurred.

Sofia immediately qualifies the clinical proposition with the demands of a police investigation. When an accusation rests on memories that were inaccessible and later recovered, the alleged assault still has to be proved. She warns that investigators cannot disregard the possibility that an innocent man might be accused and convicted. Her explanation therefore holds two obligations together: take seriously the possibility that trauma disrupts access to memory, and preserve the evidentiary caution required when a person is accused. The remembered experience may matter deeply to the person recalling it, but that significance does not remove the need to establish what happened.

She also describes particular complications in children’s accounts. Children may have difficulty locating events in time or determining how often they happened. They may assume that adults already know what they could report, and may be more likely to leave out sexual details than to emphasize them. Sofia links recollection to perception—to what a person sees, hears, and feels—rather than treating memory as a complete record that can be summoned at will. These observations explain why an account may emerge unevenly, without turning unevenness itself into proof.

Perception as a Route Back

To illustrate how a memory can return through an ordinary cue, Sofia describes a clinical example involving a teenage girl. The girl recognizes a scent associated with her boyfriend as one she has encountered before; that recognition begins a process through which she remembers her father’s abuse. The example is not a claim that every sensory resemblance recovers a reliable memory. It shows instead how perception can prompt a chain of association whose significance becomes clear only after the first recognition.

A dated recollection elsewhere in the novel uses the language of incubation to express uncertainty about an illness that may have begun in Sierra Leone and remained after the journey home. The speaker wonders whether the waiting period is ending and whether the illness is already present, describing it as having remained inside and made the speaker mad. The passage does not provide a clinical account of traumatic memory, but its structure is relevant to the novel’s treatment of what is hidden: an unseen condition is imagined as continuing before it can be named, and understanding arrives as a question rather than a settled explanation.

Sofia’s own recollections likewise do not appear as a continuous record. She knows that by the next day she will remember nothing, and compares this uncertainty with a glade beside a lake in Dala-Floda that she once found, then spent weeks trying to locate again. She has lived with gaps in her memory since childhood. The lost place gives those gaps a concrete form: an experience can be real and vivid enough to matter, yet resist deliberate recovery when she tries to return to it.

Returns, Gaps, and Uncertain Knowledge

As Sofia thinks about Gröna Lund and the night Johan went missing, images begin to take hold. One recognition becomes clear: she had seen Victoria Bergman. The sequence moves from an attempt to retrieve a past event to an image gathering force and, finally, to a specific identification. It does not establish that every surrounding detail has returned with equal clarity. Instead, the moment shows memory becoming available in a partial and consequential form.

Other pieces of knowledge surface with the same uncertainty. Sofia knows that she has a daughter in Denmark and remembers that she once went to find Madeleine, but cannot know whether that memory will remain accessible the next day. The novel places the content of recollection beside the instability of access: the daughter and the remembered search are present to Sofia now, while their persistence in consciousness is not assured. This makes memory loss more than a missing passage in a personal history; it affects what a person can carry forward as knowledge of her own life.

The relation between perception and return also has a social dimension. At Sofia Zetterlund’s Clinic at Mariatorget, Samuel Bai initially seems reserved and uninterested. When Sofia suggests that they speak Krio rather than English, he becomes more communicative. This encounter does not show him recovering a traumatic memory, but it provides a contrast to the idea that an account emerges independently of its conditions: a change in language changes how readily Samuel speaks. The episode supports a narrower point about access to expression, not a conclusion about what he remembers.

Therapy, Trust, and Narrative Form

When Ann-Britt tells Sofia that Linnea Lundström has arrived, Sofia goes to meet her in the waiting room. Later, Linnea sits across the desk, and Sofia is surprised by how quickly she has gained the girl’s trust. The setting and the change in their interaction give the memory discussion a practical context: an account may depend not only on what can be recalled, but also on whether the person speaking feels able to speak. The scene does not establish that Linnea has recovered a particular memory; it shows Sofia attending to the conditions of trust while considering the limits of interpretation.

Across these scenes, recollection is neither wholly absent nor simply restored. It can remain inaccessible, return through perception, or appear as a fragment whose durability is uncertain. Sofia’s clinical caution prevents the narrative from equating a memory gap with proof, while her own intermittent recollections make the gap personally consequential. The novel’s shifts between explanation, remembered images, and uncertainty formally echo the subject: information arrives in pieces, and each return changes what is understood without necessarily making the past complete.