a-general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis-sigmund-freud

later experiences. One meets with individual persons, to be sure, who can
boast of a continuous memory from the very beginning to the present day,
but the other condition, that of a gap in the memory, is far more frequent. I
believe we have not laid enough stress on this fact. The child is able to speak
well at the age of two, it soon shows that it can become adjusted to the most
complicated psychic situations, and makes remarks which years later are
retold to it, but which it has itself entirely forgotten. Besides, the memory in
the early years is more facile, because it is less burdened than in later years.
Nor is there any reason for considering the memory-function as a particularly
high or difficult psychic performance; in fact, the contrary is true, and you can
find a good memory in persons who stand very low intellectually.
As a second peculiarity closely related to the first, I must point out that
certain well-preserved memories, for the most part formatively experienced,
stand forth in this memory-void which surrounds the first years of childhood
and do not justify this hypothesis. Our memory deals selectively with its later
materials, with impressions which come to us in later life. It retains the
important and discards the unimportant. This is not true of the retained
childhood memories. They do not bespeak necessarily important experiences
of childhood, not even such as from the viewpoint of the child need appear of
importance. They are often so banal and intrinsically so meaningless that we
ask ourselves in wonder why just these details have escaped being forgotten.
I once endeavored to approach the riddle of childhood amnesia and the
interrupted memory remnants with the help of analysis, and I arrived at the
conclusion that in the case of the child, too, only the important has remained
in the memory, except that by means of the process of condensation already
known to you, and especially by means of distortion, the important is
represented in the memory by something that appears unimportant. For this
reason I have called these childhood memories "disguise-memories,"
memories used to conceal; by means of careful analysis one is able to
develop out of them everything that is forgotten.
In psychoanalytic treatment we are regularly called upon to fill out the
infantile memory gaps, and in so far as the cure is to any degree successful,
we are able again to bring to light the content of the childhood years thus
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