Permanently Erasing Memories & Past Lives

In lieu of several movies I've seen lately, it seems like it will be, if not already, feasible to delete certain aspects of a persons memory.
I know that psychologists and psychiatrists have ways of bringing out memories that are long forgotten, but what if they can remove them. Not just brainwash, but permanently delete it.
They say that people can't remember their past lives.... makes me wonder.

There has been such discussion about the validity of remembered repressed memories. There have been cases in which people have claimt to remember being abused in satantic rituals. No evidence was ever found to support these claims. It seems that people are very open to suggestion and that memories can change a lot. That's why eye witnesses can never be completely trusted. Long forgotten memories are fuzzy and can often be interpreted in different ways.

Pernamently deleting memories should not be a real problem. Your brain does it all the time. It throws out all the useless junk you don't need to remember and stores the important part. I don't know a lot of psychology, but I can't think of any ways a psychologist can manualy trigger the deletion of a memory.

Past lives are a totally different problems. If memories are stored in your brain and every child's brain is newly formed in the uterus, then how can the memories of past lives be transferred? That requires the belief in a soul of some sort, which has never been empirically proven.