Double Exposure
January 28, 2025 at 10:21PMA century ago, psychologists believed that our earliest memories began at three years old; before that age, Freud wrote, we are susceptible to “infantile amnesia,” a grand slate-clearing of events that, nevertheless, leave “a definite influence for all future time.” For Jonathan Weiner, a photograph of his family taken in 1956, when he was just two, revealed his mother’s lost pregnancy and granted him new access to a few foundational memories–“those free-floating, undated scenes that are usually hard, or impossible, to explain.” In his researched essay, Weiner, a science writer, investigates those scenes with the help of a neurobiologist and psychoanalyst, to better understand why so many of our earliest moments are swept from our memories.
Why are our first memories so brief, so fragmentary, like snapshots without captions? And why don’t they go back any further? Why not all the way back to the beginning? In other words, why are we all amnesiacs? Many of our earliest experiences must have been intense, and even though we have forgotten them, as Freud notes, those experiences “have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of the person.” Rather, “they have left a definite influence for all future time.” Somehow, our first memories are forgotten but not gone.
More picks about memory
Against Rereading
“For those who do not reread, a book is like a little life. When it ends, it dies—or it lives on, imperfectly and embellished, in your memories.”
Mere Belief
“One of the pivotal purposes of memoir is to unveil the shades of meaning that exist in what we believe.”
Piecing Together My Father’s Murder
“I was too young to remember what happened to my dad, and no one explained it to me. So I tried to assemble the story myself.”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/01/28/double-exposure/
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