Childhood amnesia, storytelling, and the lifelong game of memory (part three)
So, we arrive at this pathos, this realization that any effort to identify first memories must reckon with forgetting. If life were a room, then remembering and forgetting would jostle for space behind its door. Those of us who are growing older know that forgetting may gain the upper hand before we make our exit. But we can note that this is nothing new. It has happened before, in our earliest years.
I closed the previous post with Freud’s observation that the failure of memory we experience for the first years of our lives “turns everyone’s childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch” (Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality, 1905). Freud attributed what he termed “the remarkable amnesia of childhood” to the repression of disturbing content/experience during the child’s psychosexual development (Freud, Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, 1916).
Of course, the concept has been much researched and re-worked since Freud so that now, childhood amnesia is viewed as a cognitive phenomenon best understood as having to do with child brain development, specifically the brain’s capacity to encode memories. What we now know is that childhood amnesia emerges around the age of seven. Up to then, children are remarkably good at remembering earlier events:
Although adults exhibit limited abilities to retrieve memories from their early childhood, young children, including toddlers, are capable of recalling information about their past experiences following delays of days, months, and even years. Yet many of the early memories become inaccessible or “forgotten” as children grow older such that by late adolescence, children exhibit childhood amnesia to a similar extent or magnitude as adults do. (Qi Wang & Sami Gulgoz, “New Perspectives on Childhood Memory,” Memory (Journal), 2019)
There is now wide agreement that the emergence of childhood amnesia can be explained by brain development. Although two-year-olds are able to answer basic questions about recent events, they tend to need prompting or cue words to do so. For the next few years, they grow more proficient at recalling and describing life events. Yet as this skill progresses – i.e. as they learn to narrate their past, to develop a sense of autobiographical memory – that progress coincides (from about the age of seven) with a forgetting of those early events that occurred before the brain began to achieve that narrative capability. This is why most researchers agree that our earliest memories usually date from age three or four.
Here we have one of life’s bittersweet ironies, almost another reworking of Didion’s statement insofar as our growing ability to tell ourselves stories coincides with the loss of three or four years of memory. Indeed, psychologist Romeo Vitelli notes that, “Since narrative retelling allows us to ‘rehearse’ important memories and retain them longer, memories that are not rehearsed become inaccessible over time and can be quickly forgotten as a result.” (Vitelli, “Exploring Childhood Amnesia” Psychology Today, 2014)
Vitelli cites further research showing that the rate of forgetting is most accelerated during the period in which childhood amnesia emerges, i.e. around the age of seven, when “children rapidly forgot memories of early childhood, but that forgetting slows as children grow older. This suggests that the number of available memories relating to early childhood shrinks rapidly in children. For adults, however, memory is less vulnerable to forgetting due to better memory consolidation.”
Memory consolidation refers to the gradual development and rehearsal of autobiographical memory, the ability to narrate our past and repeat those narrations over the years. And here, it’s important to recall that we constantly revise our memories. No one made this point more eloquently than Freud:
It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves. (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899)
The reader will forgive me for returning to this passage often in my posts about memory, but it is our best reminder that memory is a form of representation as much as it is a cognitive process. This passage, we might say, is where Didion and all auto-biographers/memoirists/artists before and after her come to meet the psychologists and neuroscientists. As beings who remember and forget and remember and forget with varying degrees of accuracy (cognition), we all must have recourse to the narrative devices of storytelling (representation).
Moreover, all storytellers benefit from cues, props, stories told by others. And so, what happens to our seven-plus aged selves as we start to develop autobiographical memory? We begin to gather and create our personal archives. We gain photographs, mementos, household objects, family heirlooms, personal possessions. My father clung to his high school basketball trophy, won only a year before he went to war, for his entire life and I now keep it in my possession; I held onto my first pair of ice skates until a transatlantic move pressed me to give it up.
And of course, we absorb the narratives of others, initially our parents, then as our world widens, of extended family, friends, and colleagues. Here, it is worth noting that those early (and even later) childhood memories we believe we remember often derive from memories handed to us from our parents or other close family members. For example, I have a deep fear of swimming too far out (losing my footing) in any lake, ocean, or pool. I am certain this fear comes from a memory of a near-drowning incident that occurred when I was four or five. But rather like the nostalgia I experience upon seeing the old sofa, the only real memory (or perhaps more accurately, a triggered return) is of an affect - in this instance, fear.
I possess no memory of the incident itself, but I regularly catch myself believing that I do. This is because the near-drowning incident entered the family annals, became a family story, an explanation even, of a child who exhibited terror at the thought of swimming in a lake. Soon, this ‘memory’ was little more than what various people said happened. And it was constantly revised as it passed from one person to another, one year to another. Sometimes, I was told it happened when I was four. Sometimes, I was five. Sometimes they said, “now what year was that?” As if the event, unlike my fear, was receding in importance. As if they were trying to trick me into forgetting it. Into forgetting what I could not remember. But to borrow from Freud again, the affect had the last word. The affect that is “always in the right,” however degraded the memory itself.
If you recall, I began this three-part writing following a week during which I witnessed the courage of my friend as she grapples, from minute to minute now, with the decay of memory. There is something in this universal story of childhood amnesia that levels us. Brings the two of us closer, provides a glimpse of shared experience. I know that soon she will forget our week together if she has not done so already. I, with all the failings and fictions of human memory all too evident to me, must remember for both of us. It’s a story of our friendship.