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Psychoanalytic and academic psychology have long been interested in perception and memory and their development. It is now assumed that perception and memory are functions of autonomous apparatuses, and that the development of these functions depends on the maturation of those apparatuses in interaction with the environment.
Freud postulated early that "all impressions are preserved, not only in the same form in which they were first received, but also in all the forms which they have adopted in their further developments" (1901, p. 275, n.). Freud (1918) used this hypothesis in his interpretation of the "wolves dream." He postulated that the memory trace of a primal-scene observation which, according to reconstruction in the analysis of the Wolf Man, had occurred at the age of one and a half (when the boy could not yet grasp the meaning of his perception) subsequently acquired a dynamic impact through superimposed memory traces laid down in the interval. On another occasion Freud stated: "while he [a child] is not yet credited with possessing an understanding or a memory … the possibility cannot be rejected that he will be able to understand and react to the impression in retrospect(1916-1917, p. 369).
This postulate, that the subsequent recall of a memory trace of visual perception may carry with it information of a higher order of abstraction, has thus far remained hypothetical. This is not surprising. An assumption of this kind, based as it is on reconstruction, is open to certain doubts. Longitudinal studies have elucidated, e.g., the "birth" of a screen memory (Kennedy, 1950), but they are not geared