The Infantile Amnesia Criticized
The so-called amnesia of childhood, which plays an important part in the “Three Contributions,” is a similar illegitimate retrograde application from pathology. Amnesia is a pathological condition, consisting in the repression of certain contents of the conscious. This condition cannot possibly be the same as the antegrade amnesia of children, which consists in an incapacity for intentional reproduction, a condition we find also among savages. This incapacity for reproduction dates from birth, and can be understood on obvious anatomical and biological grounds. It would be a strange hypothesis were we willing to regard this totally different quality of early infantile consciousness as one to be attributed to repression, in analogy with the condition in neurosis. The amnesia of neurosis is punched out, as it were, from the continuity of memory, but the remembrances of earlier childhood exist in separate islands in the continuity of the non-memory. This condition is the opposite in every sense of the condition of neurosis, so that the expression “amnesia,” generally used for this condition, is incorrect. The “amnesia of childhood” is a conclusion a posteriori from the psychology of neurosis, just as is the “polymorphic perverse” disposition of the child.