Should I trust childhood memories?

“Once, when the nanny was taking me in a big carriage down the street, a man tried to kidnap me. He was prevented by the leather belt with which I was fastened, and the nanny bravely resisted (I vaguely see her scratched face, purple stripes on her forehead). A crowd gathered, a policeman came, and the man ran away. I still see this scene and even remember that it all happened near the metro station. For all its realism and abundance of detail, this memory, which is told by the famous child psychologist Jean Piaget, was just a fiction. For many years, Piaget believed that they really were trying to kidnap him. But one day the nanny admitted in a letter that she made it all up, she just wanted to draw attention to herself. The story of the unsuccessful kidnapping was retold by his parents more than once: listening to them, the boy imagined it as vividly as if it were real. And I remembered my fantasy. Later, becoming a world-famous psychologist, he emphasized that many early memories, no doubt, are phenomena of the same order. We “remember” what other people tell us.

There is no way to accurately distinguish true memories from false ones. Both of them can be accompanied by strong emotions and a lot of details.

We begin to accumulate information even in the womb, but memories in the full sense of the word appear when the child masters speech well, not earlier than two or three years. “Until this moment, the brain of a small child is not yet able to analyze, and therefore remember everything that he encounters, that responds to him, causing emotions and strong feelings,” explains psychoanalyst Virginie Meggle. But there are those who claim that they remember themselves in the first months of life and even at the moment of birth. Is it safe to call them victims of false memories? Not necessary. “The time of the first emotional impressions varies greatly (from one and a half to two years to eight to nine), says psychologist Elena Sidorenko. “Sometimes the earliest memory is dated accurately and very early, for example, flying on an airplane with the whole family. The child is seven and a half months old, he lies in the aircraft cradle and remembers the ceiling in every detail, with all the rivets. And years later, he suddenly remembers this moment as a not quite clear image, as a vaguely flickering picture.

Key to reality

But it is also true that many of our early memories are more fictional, “fabricated” than real. “My parents told me so often with laughter how they forgot me in the supermarket that I seem to remember in detail how it was,” admits 32-year-old Alla. “I remember that I was alone for a very long time, although my mother assures me that she immediately returned for me.” This “memory” seems to haunt Alla. In order not to be “forgotten” again, she involuntarily behaves in such a way that both at home and at work they could not do without her. “In children, the fear of being lost, abandoned is so strong that every moment in such a situation can seem like an eternity,” explains psychoanalyst Marina Harutyunyan. Many of us may remember a similar incident. But far from always this experience becomes the key to all life. Perhaps for Alla it became so significant because of the frivolous (“with laughter”) interpretation of adults. She could have the feeling that they are unreliable, since they do not understand, do not feel the horror she has experienced.

own truth

Can they even be absolutely true? “Memories, especially early ones, are the building blocks from which we build our biography, our “I”, our personal myth, says the psychoanalyst. “Actually, it’s more of a fantasy of ours. They feed on our memory, but distort it, transform it.” There are no “pure” memories, fixed once and for all. Over the years, we remember events not as they happened, but as we experience them. That is why our memories rarely exactly match those of, for example, our relatives, brothers and sisters. And yet, although inaccurate and not quite real, they are in some way telling the truth. “Not the truth with a capital T, but our own truth,” says Virginie Meggle. – This is the whole difference between concrete reality and that “other scene”, that theater of shadows, which Freud called “psychic reality”.

Warm, bright memories and sad, gloomy – they are all important to us. “Life often resembles a zone of turbulence, and in order to maintain stability, it is very important for a person to remember himself as good, the world as good,” says Marina Harutyunyan. “Our good memories play a comforting role, these are the anchor points that help us pull ourselves together.” But difficult childhood memories can also become a stability factor if a person embellishes them, says neuropsychologist and ethologist Boris Cyrulnik. “False memories allow us to recreate our internal images and regain hope: “not all men are traitors”, “you can always find a solution.” Those who have not done such work risk remaining prisoners of their history, anxiety, fear.”

Double game

Sometimes we are surprised by the selectivity of memory, which preserves seemingly random, trifling events. However, do not underestimate them. Freud said that such a random memory can contain everything about a person’s childhood. What is it about? “Sometimes we force out of consciousness something significant, but traumatic, painful, or something that does not pass our internal censorship, which is simply unacceptable for us,” says Marina Harutyunyan. We seem to be forgetting about it. However, the experience does not disappear, it is stored in the unconscious and seeks to break through to us again. Memory finds a safe way to tell us this – through other episodes, more innocent, “random”. It turns out such a double game: the memory hides something and at the same time demonstrates something. And this mystery does not always need to be solved.

Of all early childhood, memory leaves only a few memories: three, five, seven … We easily share these childhood stories with other people, because we usually perceive them as “just facts”. “In fact, through early memories, we ourselves, without noticing it, admit our view of the world and attitude towards others,” explains Elena Sidorenko.

Necessary Fiction

Svetlana is 51 years old, and she believes that her self-esteem problems began from the day when a friend of her parents, a famous singer, gave her a cap with a large visor that hides her face: “He let me know that I’m ugly!” Marina Harutyunyan suggests a different connection: “Before this meeting, the girl, most likely, was worried about her appearance. “Not good”, “there is nothing to love for” – maybe in the eyes of her parents she did not catch that admiration that would convince her of the opposite. And she transferred her need for recognition to a family friend. That is why the episode with the cap played the role of a sentence. Here cause and effect are reversed.

24-year-old Irina for a long time “remembered” many situations from childhood, when her mother was not around. But then I realized that it was the other way around: my mother came home from work at five and was at home all the evenings. But the father appeared late, when the girl was sleeping. These deformed memories still tell the truth – they convey Irina’s feeling that her mother was distant, cold with her.

At 38, Laura still wants to know if she dreamed the scene. “I am four or five years old. Mom and her friend are sitting in the kitchen, and I hear my mother say that she would have survived the death of her children more easily than her husband. Years later, she claimed that she could not pronounce such a thing, it was impossible. Parents are not the best witnesses, warns Marina Harutyunyan. “Their memory also transforms reality. In this case, the mother could simply forget her words, push out this episode. Perhaps she – today, no longer in love with her husband without memory – sincerely believes that she could not even think of such a thing! Was it really or in the fantasy of a jealous girl, it’s unlikely to find out for sure.

The family is the focus of strong feelings, often unconscious, and therefore painful memories are familiar to many of us. It is impossible to protect our children from them, because we cannot know exactly how a child experiences an event and how he will remember it, says Virginie Meggle: “This or that word will impress one person, not the other. But most importantly, we all need these (true or not) stories. To feel like yourself.”

* J. Piaget “The Formation of the symbol in the child” (Delachaux and Niestlé, 1992).

** “Pedology. New Age”, 2001, No. 8.