might well be supposed that the influence of the latter period would be
easier to understand, and that it would be entitled to more
consideration than heredity.[1] To be sure, one occasionally finds in
medical literature notes on the premature sexual activities of small
children, about erections and masturbation and even actions resembling
coitus, but these are referred to merely as exceptional occurrences, as
curiosities, or as deterring examples of premature perversity. No author
has to my knowledge recognized the normality of the sexual impulse in
childhood, and in the numerous writings on the development of the child
the chapter on "Sexual Development" is usually passed over.[2]

*Infantile Amnesia.*--This remarkable negligence is due partly to
conventional considerations, which influence the writers on account of
their own bringing up, and partly to a psychic phenomenon which has thus
far remained unexplained. I refer to the peculiar amnesia which veils
from most people (not from all!) the first years of their childhood,
usually the first six or eight years. So far it has not occurred to us
that this amnesia ought to surprise us, though we have good reasons for
surprise. For we are informed that in those years from which we later
obtain nothing except a few incomprehensible memory fragments, we have
vividly reacted to impressions, that we have manifested pain and
pleasure like any human being, that we have evinced love, jealousy, and
other passions as they then affected us; indeed we are told that we have
uttered remarks which proved to grown-ups that we possessed
understanding and a budding power of judgment. Still we know nothing of
all this when we become older. Why does our memory lag behind all our
other psychic activities? We really have reason to believe that at no
time of life are we more capable of impressions and reproductions than
during the years of childhood.[3]