That sensation makes us think it's all there. A psychiatrist likened it to renovating your attic, pulling up an old floorboard and finding a copy of the New York Times from 1938. Your reaction wouldn't be to tear up all the floorboards and expecting to find every other issue of the Times there as well. What we do know about memory is that so much of our existence is lost to us. We want to believe it's still all there.
People recoil at the idea of the unconscious as a myth.
A Freudian-derived construct is that everything is there. You remember the things you go over in your mind or have a reason to remember. And that's the classic mode of therapy, rehashing and rehashing and rehashing memory. And when you do that, you often end up creating narrative truths. It's said that they at least have the ability to relieve the sense of anxiety people have about losing their memories.