On 7 November Rick Stevens quoted a reader’s comment in New Scientist concerning explanations for infantile amnesia:
>This ties in with Freud's "selective-reconstruction" model, where >early memories remain outside our conscious awareness because of >a failure of translation between lower and higher-order levels of >cognitive processing. Insofar as this sentence relates at all to anything that Freud actually proposed, this again sounds like ritually invoking Freud for some general idea (the process of reconstructing narrative memory), although it predates Freud, and was used by him in a highly specific way that few people would accept. Freud’s explanation for infantile amnesia was originally that it was the result of repression, the concealing from the child himself “the beginnings of his own sexual life”, the most important aspect of which was infantile masturbation (“Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality”). Later the emphasis changed to the repression of memories of the male child’s lusting after his mother and homicidal hatred of his father. Both explanations are essentially evidence-free, though the later one in particular was inevitably ‘corroborated’ by the interpretation of dreams and “transferences”. Incidentally, Freud’s theories of infantile psychosexual development were predominantly based on males for the first thirty years of psychoanalytic history. This is strange (or perhaps not), when one considers that in the early days of psychoanalysis most of his patients were women, and that his analytic technique for accessing the contents of the Unconscious was gender-neutral. Allen Esterson Former lecturer, Science Dept Southwark College, London [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.human-nature.com/esterson/index.html --- You are currently subscribed to tips as: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To unsubscribe send a blank email to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
