Some who work with victims of trauma are defending and developing new techniques for what might be called ‘therapeutic forgetting’ —New York Times. We have the capacity to interfere pharmacologically with the storage or retrieval of painful memories; but should we? Bioethicists and others argue that having had nightmarish experiences is part of what makes us what we are, and that blunting the memory of painful events diminishes us and prevents us from learning from our experiences. I have previously written in horror about the efforts of the military to use immediate interventions, or even prophylaxis, into battlefield trauma to enhance soldiers’ abilities to remain efficient and dehumanized warriors in the face of the horror of what they do and see done in war. One might argue that that is a slightly different issue, as the victims of most trauma have little or no moral responsibility for their victimization as contrasted with the Pentagon’s ‘fighting machines.’ Nevertheless, I share the alarm about the ‘therapeutic forgetting’ research. If I were living in a hopeless, terminal world like that depicted in post-apocalyptic fiction, where these is essentially no future in store, I might feel differently, but the process of recovering from trauma without shortcuts provides for the future. Moreover, the researchers themselves raise the possibility that interfering with the laying down or retrieval of intense memories might not selectively screen for the alarming or painful ones, and emotionally intense pleasant memories might be blocked or dulled in the process. Finally, the use of such techniques could in all likelihood not be restricted to clinically significant traumas. In much the same way that the burgeoning use of antidepressants since Prozac has led to an age of ‘cosmetic psychopharmacology’, we could look forward to the further twisting of the human soul by unrestricted damping of the most trivially or mundanely unpleasant memories.