Memories of Early Childhood in Autobiographies

In the course of a study of autobiographies I came upon a number of very early memories. Interest in such recollections remembered outside of clinical context is not new in psychoanalytic literature. Freud (1910), (1917) has devoted some papers to these problems and Bernfeld (1925) has dealt with them.

This must not cause us to overlook the fact that memories dealing with early childhood are rare in autobiographies, if by "early" we mean that period which for most adults is veiled by the normal childhood amnesia. Burr (1909) has found references to the first three years in only thirty-nine out of about three hundred autobiographies that she studied. With some notable exceptions, such references are brief and of meager content. It is in fact surprising to find that childhood is usually given very little space in autobiographies—not only in works of the type which James Strachey, the translator of Freud's autobiography, has felicitously termed "autoergography," but even in works that purport to deal especially with emotional development. In Rousseau's voluminous classic for instance, the first seven years are treated in three pages out of five hundred.

Very early memories are found in writers of various nationalities, including the English writers Hudson, Galt, Gosse, and Sitwell; the Frenchmen Stendhal, Loti, and Anatole France; the Russian Stravinsky; but particularly in authors who wrote in German, i.e., writers of German, Austrian, or Swiss nationality. These were writers who either represented the Romantic School of literature or were influenced by it—especially Stifter, Jean Paul, Spitteler, and Wildgans. Their works are only partly available in English; the translations of the other passages were prepared for this paper.

These autobiographical accounts are presented here from the viewpoint of an educator exploring child development, without the benefit of