第50页 第四章：童年回忆与遮蔽性记忆

在这些童年期的朦胧回忆之中，有些看起来相当地合理，有些却似乎奇怪而不可理喻……我们不久便会发觉，没有人能够保证它们的正确性。某些记忆里的形象无疑是虚假的，或是残缺不全的，或是时空上的被替换……我们也能很快地发觉这类经验的变形与替换的动机，它同时也表明忆起的错误并不只是由记忆不可靠而引起的。童年以后的各种强烈的力量一直在塑造着我们童年经验的记忆容量——可能也就是这种力量的作用，使得我们无法理解我们的童年岁月。

…………所谓的童年期回忆并不真是记忆的痕迹，而是后来润饰过了的产品，这种润湿承受多种日后发展的心智力量的影响。所以，令人“朦胧”的童年回忆不只进一步扩展了“遮蔽性记忆”的意义，同时它也和民族神话、传说的累积有着令人注目的相似之处。
Of the childhood memories that have been retained a few strike us as perfectly understandable, while others seem odd or unintelligible. It is not difficult to correct certain errors regarding both sorts. If the memories that a person has retained are subjected to an analytic enquiry, it is easy to establish that there is no guarantee of their accuracy. Some of the mnemic images are certainly falsified, incomplete or displaced in time and place. Any such statement by the subjects of the enquiry as that their first recollection comes from about their second year is clearly not to be trusted. Moreover, motives can soon be discovered which make the distortion and displacement of the experience intelligible, but which show at the same time that these mistakes in recollection cannot be caused simply by a treacherous memory. Strong forces from later life have been at work on the capacity of childhood experiences for being remembered - probably the same forces which are responsible for our having become so far removed in general from understanding our years of childhood.

……Furthermore it contradicts all that we have learnt to suppose that in his experiences a child’s attention is directed to himself instead of exclusively to impressions from outside. One is thus forced by various considerations to suspect that in the so-called earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been subjected to the influences of a variety of later psychical forces. Thus the ‘childhood memories’ of individuals come in general to acquire the significance of  ‘screen memories’ and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends and myths.

-P1140