The inability of adults to recall early autobiographical memories in the first few years of their lives. Most people report their earliest memory to be between their third and fourth birthdays, and generally memories of childhood do not become a continuous narrative until after about seven years of age. Identified for the first time in 1893 in a publication in the American Journal of Psychology, some years later Sigmund Freud (1916/1966), in his Introductory lectures on psychoanalysis, claimed that childhood amnesia was due to the repression of inappropriate or disturbing content of early, often traumatic sexual experiences. In more recent years, two basic, quite different, explanations for this phenomenon appeared: one is that brain structures critical to memory are too immature during the first few years of life to record long-term memories, and the other that children cannot remember events occurring before they have mastered language. Accordingly, language provides a system of symbolic representation by which people develop narrative stories of their lives. Such a narrative framework may be necessary for people to remember autobiographical events in a coherent context. In the late 1980s, the existence of childhood amnesia was challenged by Robyn Fivush and her colleagues, when they demonstrated autobiographical recall by children only 2.5 years of age, who provided verbal descriptions of unique events experienced six or more months in the past.
See Autobiographical memory, Memory