Functional MR Imaging of Psychogenic

We present here a case in which functional MR imaging (fMRI) was done for a patient who developed retrograde psychogenic amnesia for a four year period of her life history after a severe stressful event. We performed the fMRI study for a face recognition task using stimulation with three kinds of face photographs: rec-ognizable familiar faces, unrecognizable friends ’ faces due to the psychogenic amnesia, and unfamiliar control faces. Different activation patterns between the recognizable faces and unrecognizable faces were found in the limbic area, and especially in the amygdala and hippocampus. sychogenic amnesia is a dissociative disorder characterized by a sudden memory loss that concerns important personal information and there is usually selective retrograde amnesia too, but this condition is not due to an organic mental disorder. The amnesia may follow severe psychological stress or it may be an unconscious response to an internal conflict or to an intolerable life situation (1). The patient with psychogenic amnesia usually has difficulties for face recognition and the affective response to faces in relation to the faces ’ familiarit