Childhood amnesia, storytelling, and the lifelong game of memory (part two)
So, about that sofa which made its appearance in part one. The sofa which, by the pattern and texture of its cover, lays claim to the prize of “first memory.” There are two matters to pursue here.
First, this appears to be a sense memory, one invoking the two specific senses of touch and sight. As such, it has no grammar, no words or narrative other than what I might impose upon it retrospectively. In this, it resembles a dream. Freud remarked that “words are often treated in dreams as things.” Dreams turn our latent thoughts/wishes into images or scenes (the dream’s manifest content) which we, upon waking, try to put back into words. We seek to recover a meaning that the dream has disguised.
Yet in relation to this particular memory, this waking dream, I struggle to find my way back to words or meaning. All I have is a remote, untethered flash of recognition accompanied by affect – in this case, a pang of bittersweet longing (nostalgia) brought on by the texture and design of the sofa. Again, we find a parallel in Freud’s conception of dreams. He cites Austrian pathologist Salomon Stricker’s remark that “If I am afraid of robbers in my dreams, the robbers, to be sure, are imaginary, but the fear of them is real.”
To which Freud adds: “the same thing is true if I rejoice in my dream. According to the testimony of our feelings, an affect experienced in a dream is in no way inferior to one of like intensity experienced in waking life, and the dream presses its claim to be accepted as part of our real psychic experiences, by virtue of its affective rather than its ideational content.”
So far, so good. I can perhaps stake some claim to the sofa as a (dreamlike) earliest memory, even if I can derive no description of a past self or event from it. Even if I find nothing more than the immediate affect it rouses, even if I experience no Proustian passage from involuntary to autobiographical memory for, and here I borrow far too cheekily from Mr. Freud, “the affect is always in the right.”
But – and here is the second thing of note about this memory – my so-far-so-good was as fleeting as memory itself. Because as tightly as I might cling to my memory of the sofa, my more cautious self must admit that it did not occur to me as a ‘first memory’ until I found the photograph. My finding of the photograph happened in 2003, after my mother died, in the course of going through her belongings.
Did the discovery of the photo trigger a ‘real’ first memory or did it simply allow me to create a narrative? Something along these lines: I have a first memory and here it is. Finally! I have found my first memory. Life was so empty without it. In other words, the photograph encouraged me to tell myself a story of remembering. A story more about memory itself than about the sofa. We tell ourselves stories to remember. To find the “affect that is always in the right.”
Here, Freud would surely draw my attention away from my ‘dreamlike’ descent into nostalgia to remind me of what he called “infantile amnesia… that failure of memory for the first years of our lives,” that “turns everyone’s childhood into something like a prehistoric epoch.”
In part three, I’ll re-visit this poignant ‘forgetting’ of our early years, and look at how explanations of it changed after Freud. Thanks for reading.