Childhood is to youth what manhood is to age. Children must first by fear be induced to know that which after when they do know, they are most glad of. Some examinations show wide individual variations, inasmuch as some trace their first reminiscences to the sixth month of life, while others can recall nothing of their lives before the end of the sixth or even the eight years. I believe we accept too indifferently the fact of infantile amnesia—that is, the failure of memory for the first years of our lives—and fail to find it strange in a riddle.   We forget of what great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child of four years is capable. We really ought to wonder why the memory of later years has, as a rule, retained so little of these psychic processes, especially as we have every reason for assuming that these same forgotten childhood activities have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person, but that they have left a definite influence for all future time. Yet, in spite of this unparalleled effectiveness they were forgotten!  This would suggest that there are particularly formed conditions of memory (in the sense of conscious reproduction) which have this far eluded our knowledge. It is quite possible that the forgetting of childhood many give us the key to the understanding of those amnesias which, according to our newer studies, rest at the basis of the formation of all neurotic symptoms.

Of these retained childhood reminiscences, some appear to us readily comprehensible, while others seem strange or unintelligible, much like the gibberish in Rihanna’s song “Work.” It is not difficult to correct certain errors in regard to both kinds.  If the retained reminiscences of a person are subjected to an analytic test, it can be readily ascertained that a guarantee for their correctness does not exists. Some of the memory pictures are surely falsified and incomplete or displaced in point of time and place. The assertions of persons examined, that their first memories reach back perhaps to their second year, are evidently unreliable. Motives can soon be discovered which explain the disfigurement and the displacement of these experiences, but they also demonstrate that these memory lapses are not the result of a mere unreliable memory. Powerful forces from a later period have moulded the memory capacity to our infantile experiences, and it is probably due to these same forces that the understanding of our childhood is generally so very strange to us.  The recollection of adults, as is known, proceeds through different psychic material. Some recall by means of visual pictures—their memories are of visual character; other individuals can scarcely reproduce in memory the most partly sketch of an experience; we call such persons “aduitifs” and “moteurs” in contrast to the “visuels.” These differences vanish in dreams; all our dreams are preponderatingly visual. However, the development is also found in the childhood memories; the latter are plastic and visual, even in those people whose later memories lacks the visual element.

The visual memory, therefore, preserves the type of infantile recollections. Only my earliest childhood memories are of a visual character; they represent plastically depicted scenes, comparable only to stage settings.   In these scenes of childhood, whether they prove to be true or false, one usually sees his own childish person both in countour and dress. This circumstance must excite our wonder, for adults do not see their own person in their recollections of later experiences. It is, moreover, against our experiences to assume that the child’s attention during his experiences is centered on himself rather than exclusively on outside impressions. Various sources force us to assume that the so-called earliest childhood recollections are not true memory traces but later elaborations of the same, elaborations which might have been subjected to the influences of many later psychic forces. Thus, the “childhood reminiscences” of individuals altogether advance to the significations of “concealing memories,” and thereby from a noteworthy analogy to the childhood reminiscences as laid down in the legend and myths of nations. Whoever has examined mentally a number of persons by the method of psychoanalysis must have gathered in this work numerous examples of concealing memories of every description. However, owing to the previously discussed nature of the relations of the childhood reminiscences to later life, it becomes extraordinarily difficult to report such examples. For, in order to attach the value of the concealing memory to an infantile reminiscence, it would be often necessary to present the entire life-history of the person concerned. Only seldom is it possible, as in the following good example, to take out from its context and report a single childhood memory.

A twenty-four-year-old man preserved the following picture from the fifth year of his life: In the garden of a summerhouse, he sat on a stool next to his aunt, who was engaged in teaching him the alphabet. He found difficulty in distinguishing the letter m from n, and he begged his aunt to tell him how to tell one from the other. His aunt called his attention to the fact that the letter m had one whole portion (a stoke) more than the letter n. There was no reason to dispute the reliability of this childhood recollection; its meaning, however, was discovered only later, when it showed itself to be the symbolic representation of another boyish inquisitiveness. For just as he wanted to know the difference between m and n at that time, so he concerned himself later about the difference between boy and girl, and he would have been willing that just this aunt should be his teacher. He also discovered that the difference was a similar one; that the boy again had one whole portion more than the girl, and at the time of this recognition, his memory awoke to the corresponding childish inquisitiveness.