Memories are shaped and edited by various encoding and retrieval processes. An influential concept of these processes suggests that inhibitory control mechanisms may be recruited to prevent unwanted memories from coming to mind (Anderson, 2003), and this executive control will suppress the representation of unwanted memories. A slightly different version of this concept is that the contents of memories are inhibited rather than memories themselves. We have called this latter idea “episodic inhibition”, which emphasizes that there is a pattern of activation/inhibition over the contents of every episodic memory, and this strongly influences access to specific features of the content, e.g. representations of words in a memory of a recently acquired word list (Racsmány and Conway, 2006). The present talk will report a series of recent experiments underlying this concept. The main proposal of the talk is that inhibitory processes are acting on context-dependent, goal-based episodic memory representations.