Freud suggested that the main reason people were convinced that children had no sexual feelings is that they had actually forgotten the events of their own childhood. "Infantile Amnesia" is what he called it.
It´s very important to gain understanding of this phenomenon because early memories, if we could only unlock them, held the key to understanding all adult behaviour, from "normal" behaviour right through to that of neurotic and even psychotic people.
In most of us the phase of intantile amnesia hides the earliest beginnings of childhood up until the age of six of eight years. It is true that in most people there seems to be a state of amnesia that blocks early memories right up until the sixth or eighth year of life.
Why, then, should the function of memory apparently lag so far behind the other functions in the developing psyche? After all, is is obvious that small children can see and hear perfectly well, and react to stimuli.
What´s really going on is not a real erasing of early memory traces, it is in fact a state of deliberately "withholding" these impressions from consciousness. This is called "repression". A similar repression process in seen in neurotic patients in connection with events in later life. But what forced bring about this repression? Freud claims that early sexual impulses are taboo and frightening because they are directed towards the child´s parents, and so cannot be held intact in the psyche and have to be repressed.
Some people believe that all the memories are still there somewhere; it is just a case of finding a trigger to unearth them.
Embrace your madness.
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