ual Development" is usually passed over.[2]

*Infantile Amnesia.*--This remarkable negligence is due partly to
conventional considerations, which influence the writers on account of
their own bringing up, and partly to a psychic phenomenon which has thus
far remained unexplained. I refer to the peculiar amnesia which veils
from most people (not from all!) the first years of their childhood,
usually the first six or eight years. So far it has not occurred to us
that this amnesia ought to surprise us, though we have good reasons for
surprise. For we are informed that in those years from which we later
obtain nothing except a few incomprehensible memory fragments, we have
vividly reacted to impressions, that we have manifested pain and
pleasure like any human being, that we have evinced love, jealousy, and
other passions as they then affected us; indeed we are told that we have
uttered remarks which proved to grown-ups that we possessed
understanding and a budding power of judgment. Still we know nothing of
all this when we become older. Why does our memory lag behind all our
other psychic activities? We really have reason to believe that at no
time of life are we more capable of impressions and reproductions than
during the years of childhood.[3]

On the other hand we must assume, or we may convince ourselves through
psychological observations on others, that the very impressions which we
have forgotten have nevertheless left the deepest traces in our psychic
life, and acted as determinants for our whole future development. We
conclude therefore that we do not deal with a real forgetting of
infantile impressions but rather with an amnesia similar to that
observed in neurotics for later experiences, the nature of which
consists in their being detained from consciousness (repression). But
what forces bring about this repression of the infantile impressions? He
who can solve this riddle will also explain hysterical amnesia.

We shall not, however, hesitate to assert that the existence of the
infantile amnesia gives us a new point of comparison between the psychic
states of the child and those of the psychoneurotic. We have already
encountered another point of comparison when confronted by the fact that
the sexuality of the psychoneurotic preserves the infantile character or
has returned to it. May there not be an ultimate connection between the
infantile and the hysterical amnesias?

The connection between the infantile a