Double Exposure

I was the one who remembered everything. That was a family legend from early on. But I don’t remember this snapshot; as far as I can recall, I never saw it when I was growing up.

The photograph came to me in a text one morning when I was sitting here at my writing desk, typing on my laptop, surrounded by stacks of cardboard boxes full of pictures and letters—several lifetimes’ worth of memorabilia that I am trying to sort into a family history, or some sort of memoir. That’s my father, beaming into the camera, and that’s me at his feet, beaming up at him. My father’s sister, my Aunt Ettie, stands just behind him. On the left is Ettie’s daughter, my cousin Bonnie. On the right, my mother, laughing and looking very pregnant.

It was Cousin Bonnie who found the picture, in one of Aunt Ettie’s old albums, where it seemed perfectly ordinary and innocent, a happy family tableau. The occasion was a birthday party for my father, Bonnie said. On that page of the album, Ettie had written in red pencil, in big block letters, surprise!!

What is your first memory?

In 1895, two French psychologists, a married couple, Victor and Catherine Henri, sent out an international survey to ask that question. The Henris received more replies than they’d expected: 75 from Russia, 35 from France, seven from England, six from America. One respondent claimed to remember as far back as the age of six months. Others said they couldn’t remember anything before the age of eight. Most people’s first memories went back to the age of three.

A few years later, Caroline Miles, an instructor in psychology at Wellesley College, asked 100 students the same question. On average, their memories also went back to the age of three. Another psychologist surveyed students at Mount Holyoke and Yale and got the same result.

In Vienna, Sigmund Freud read these reports while he was writing what became his most famous book, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, which he published as a monograph in 1901. The year before that, he had published The Interpretation of Dreams; a few years later came Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious. Psychoanalysts call those three titles, in order of publication, the Dream Book, the Mistake Book, and the Joke Book. Why did you dream that dream? Why did you say that? What made you tell that joke?

Freud analyzes early memories in the Mistake Book, and there he identifies a paradox that still interests scientists who study the brain, however much or however little they regard Freud. “I believe we accept too 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,” he writes, in A. A. Brill’s translation. Why are our first memories so brief, so fragmentary, like snapshots without captions? And why don’t they go back any further? Why not all the way back to the beginning? In other words, why are we all amnesiacs? Many of our earliest experiences must have been intense, and even though we have forgotten them, as Freud notes, those experiences “have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person.” Rather, “they have left a definite influence for all future time.”

Somehow, our first memories are forgotten but not gone.

In his Mistake Book, Freud writes that we all forget what was going on in those early snapshot-like scenes for the same reason that we all make Freudian slips. Something must have been happening during those moments, something emotionally charged, some crisis we are trying to forget. The handful of images that do stay with us are only substitutes, stand-ins—“screens,” as he puts it, “for other really significant impressions, whose direct reproduction is hindered by some resistance.” We hardly know ourselves, we are prey to all kinds of forces and motives that we don’t understand, and “it is probably due to these same forces that the understanding of our childhood is generally so very strange to us.”