Psychopathology of Everyday Life by Sigmund Freud - Chapter 4 - Childhood and Concealing Memories

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Chapter four of Psychopathology of every Day Life, translated by A.
A brill Childhood and Concealing Memories. In a second essay,
I was able to demonstrate the purposive nature of our
memories in an unexpected field. I started with the remarkable

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fact that the earliest recollections of a person often seemed
to preserve the unimportant and accidental, whereas frequently, though not universally,
not a trace is found in the adult memory of
the weighty and effective impressions of this period. As it
is known that the memory exercises a certain selection among

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the impressions at its disposal, it would seem logical to
suppose that this selection follows entirely different principles in childhood
than at the time of intellectual maturity. However, close investigation
points to the fact that such an assumption is superfluous.
In different childhood memories owe existence to a process of displacement.

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It can be shown by psychoanalysis that in the reproduction
they represent the substitute for other really significant impressions whose
reproduction is hindered by some resistance. As they do not
owe their existence to their contents, but to an associative
relation of their contents to another repressed thought. They deserve

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the title of concealing memories, by which I have designated them.
In the aforementioned essay, I only touched upon, but in
no way exhausted, the varieties in the relations and meanings
of concealed memories. In the given example fully analyzed, I
particularly emphasized a peculiarity in temporal relation between the concealing

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memory and the contents of the memory concealed by it.
The content of the concealing memory in that example belongs
to one of the first years of childhood, while the
thoughts represented by it, which remained practically unconscious, belong to
a later period of the individual in question. I called

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this form of displacement a retroactive or regressive one. Perhaps
more often one finds the reversed relation, that is, an
indifferent impression of the most remote period becomes a concealing
memory in consciousness, which simply owes its existence to an
association with an earlier experience against whose direct reproduction there

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are resistances. We would call these encroaching or interposing concealing memories.
What most concerns the memory lies here chronologically beyond the
concealing memory Finally, there may be a third possible case. Namely,
the concealing memory may be connected with the impression it

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conceals not only through its content, but also through contiguity
and time. This is the contemporaneous or contiguous concealing memory.
How large a portion of the sum total of our
memory belongs to the category of concealing memories, and what
part it plays in various neurotic hidden processes. These are

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problems into the value of which I have neither inquired,
nor shall I enter. Here. I am concerned only with
emphasizing the sameness between the forgetting of proper names with
faulty recollection and the formation of concealing memories. At first sight,
it would seem that the diversities of both phenomena are

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far more striking than their exact analogies. There we deal
with proper names, here with complete impressions experienced either in
reality or in thought. There we deal with a manifest
failure of the memory function, Here with the memory act,
which appears strange to war. Again, there we are concerned

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with a momentary disturbance, For the name just forgotten could
have been reproduced correctly one hundred times before, and will
be so again from tomorrow on. Here we deal with
lasting possession without a failure for the indifferent childhood memories
seem to be able to accompany us through a great
part of life. In both these cases, the riddle seems

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to be solved in an entirely different way. There it
is the forgetting, while here it is the remembering, which
excites our scientific curiosity. After deeper reflection, one realizes that
though there is a diversity in the psychic material and
in the duration of time of the two phenomena, yet

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these are by far outweighed by the conformities between the two.
In both cases we deal with the failure to remember.
What should be correctly reproduced by memory fails to appear,
and instead something else comes as a substitute. In the
case of forgetting a name, there is no lack of
memory function in the form of name substitution. The formation

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of a concealing memory depends on the forgetting of other
important impressions. In both cases we are reminded by an
intellectual feeling of the intervention of a disturbance, which in
each case takes a different form. In the case of
forgetting of names, we are aware that the substitute of

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names are incorrect in concealing memories, we are surprised that
we have them at all. Hence, if psychological analysis demonstrates
that the substitutive formation in each case is brought about
in the same manner, that is, through displacement along a
superficial association, we are justified in saying that the diversities

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in material, in duration of time, and in the centering
of both phenomena serve to enhance our expectation that we
have discovered something that is important and of general value.
This generality purports that the stopping and straying of the
reproducing function indicates, more often than we suppose, that there

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is an intervention of a prejudicial factor, a tendency which
favors one memory and at the same time works against another.
The subject of childhood memories appears to me so important
and interesting that I would like to devote to it
a few additional remarks which go beyond the views expressed
so far. How far back into childhood do our memories reach?

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I am familiar with some investigations on this question by
V and C. Henry and Patwin. They assert that such
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

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the sixth or even the eighth year. But what connection
is there between these variations in the behavior of childhood reminiscences,
and what significance may be ascribed to them. It seems
that it is not enough to procure the material for
this question by simple inquiry, but it must later be
subjected to a study in which the person furnishing the

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information must participate. I believe we accept two indifferently the
fact of infantile amnesia, that is, the failure of memory
for the first years of our lives, and fail to
find in it a strange riddle. We forget of what
great intellectual accomplishments and of what complicated emotions a child

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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

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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 thus far eluded our knowledge.
It is possible that the forgetting of childhood gives us

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the key to understanding of amnesias, which, according to our
newer studies, lie 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.
It is not difficult to correct certain errors in regard

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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 exist.
Some of the memory pictures are surely falsified and incomplete,
or displaced in point of time and place. The assertions

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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

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forces from a later period have molded the memory capacity
of 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

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by means of visual pictures. Their memories are of a
visual care character. Other individuals can scarcely reproduce in memory
the most paltry sketch of an experience. We call such
persons auditives and motteurs. In contrast to the visuals terms
proposed by Charcot, these differences vanish in dreams. All our

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dreams are predominantly visual, but this development is also found
in childhood memories. The latter are plastic and visual, even
in those people whose later memory lacks the visual element.
The visual memory therefore preserves the type of the infantile recollections.

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Only my earliest childhood memories are visual character. They represent
plastic depicted scenes comparable only to stage settings. In these
scenes of childhood, whether they prove true or false, one
usually sees his childish person both in contour and dress.
This circumstance must excite our wonder, for adults do not

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see their own persons in their recollections of later experience.
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 the so called earliest childhood recollections are not true

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memory traces, but later elaborations of the same elaborations which
might have been subjected to the influence of many later
psychic forces. Thus, the childhood reminiscences of individuals altogether advanced
to this significance of concealing memories and thereby form a
noteworthy analogy to the childhood reminiscences as laid down in

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the Legends 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,

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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.

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A twenty four year old man preserved the following picture
from the fifth year of his life. In the garden
of a summer house. 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 begged his aunt to tell him how to tell

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one from the other. His aunt called his attention to
the fact that the letter M had one whole portion
a stroke more than the letter N. There was no
reason to dispute the reliability of the childhood recollection. Its meaning, however,
was discovered only later when it showed itself to be

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the symbolic representation of another boyish inquisitiveness. For just as
he wanted to know the difference between M and N
in 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

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the boy again had one portion more than the girl,
and at the time of this recognition his memory awoke
to the corresponding childish inquisitiveness. I would like to show
by one more example, the sense that may be gained
by a childhood reminiscence through analytic work, although it may
seem to contain no sense. Before in my forty third year,

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when I began to interest myself in what remained in
my memory of my own childhood, a scene struck me which,
for a long time, as I afterwards believed, had repeatedly
come to consciousness, and which through reliable identification, could be
traced to a period before the completion of my third year.
I saw myself in front of a chest, the door

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of which was held open by my half brother, twenty
years my senior. I stood there, demanding something and screaming
my mother pretty and slender, then suddenly entered the room,
as if returning from the street. In these words, I
formulated this scene so vividly seen, which however, furnished no

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other clue whether my brother wished to open or lock
the chest. In the first explanation, it was a cupboard.
Why I cried, what bearing the arrival of my mother had?
All these questions were dimmed to me. I was tempted
to explain to myself that it dealt with the memory
of a hoax by my older brother, which was interrupted

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by my mother. Such misunderstandings of childhood scenes retained in
the memory are not uncommon. We recall a situation, but
it is not centralized. We do not know on which
of the elements to place. The psychic accent analytic effort
led me to an entirely unexpected solution of the picture.

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I missed my mother and began to suspect that she
was locked in the cupboard or chest, and therefore demanded
that my brother should unlock it. As he obliged me,
and I became convinced that she was not in the chest.
I began to cry. This is the moment firmly retained
in the memory, which was directly followed by the appearance

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of my mother, who appeased my worry and anxiety. But
how did the child get the idea of looking for
the absent mother in the chest. Dreams which occurred at
the same time, pointed dimly to a nurse concerning whom
other reminiscences were retained, as for example, that she conscientiously

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urged me to deliver to her the small coins which
I received as gifts, a detail which in itself may
lay claim to the value of a concealing memory for
later things. I then concluded to facilitate for myself this
time the task of interpretation, and asked my mother about

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that nurse. I found out all sorts of things, among others,
the fact that this shrewd but dishonest person had committed
extensive robberies during the confinement of my mother, and that
my half brother was instrumental bringing her to justice. This
information gave me the key to the memory from childhood,

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as through a sort of inspiration. The sudden disappearance of
the nurse was not a matter of indifference to me.
I had just asked this brother where she was, probably
because I had noticed that he had played a part
in her disappearance, and he, evasive and witty as he
is to this day, answered that she was boxed in.

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I understood this answer in the childish way but asked
no more, as there was nothing else to be discovered.
When my mother left shortly thereafter, I suspected that the
naughty brother had treated her in the same way as
he did the nurse, and therefore pressed him to open
the chest. I also understand now why, in the translation

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of the visual Childhood Seen, my mother's slenderness was accentuated.
She must have struck me as being newly restored. I
am two and a half years older than the sister
born that time, and when I was three years of age,
I was separated from my half brother end of chapter

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four