From Freud we received some of our first insights into how the experiences of infancy and childhood influence all subsequent stages of development. The question raised at this point must be to what degree did Freud’s possible “failure” to come to terms with his own adolescent experience influence his view of childhood sexuality? To what degree, like the patients described by Lampl-de Groot, was Freud compelled to address what possibly was so painful to him (and painful to many of us as well) in idioms and images that made it more tolerable: the idioms and images of childhood? As Lampl-de Groot observed:
The adult looking back on his life history feels more responsible for his adolescent than f or his inf fantile behavior; he feels more guilty and more ashamed about his adolescent conflicts, disharmonies, and oddities. As he usually remembers the factual events of his adolescence, he tries to escape the revival of the accompanying guilt — and shame-burdened emotions, either by suppressing and denying every emotion of that period or by retreating to infantile experiences.
(Lampl-de Groot 1961:97-8, italics added)
This adolescent amnesia or use of infantile experience as a screen memory has also been considered by others, notably Klumpner (1978). Lamplde Groot suggests that much of this reconceptualization of the narrative of the self is encouraged by the unintended complicity of clinicians. Of considerable importance may be the psychoanalysts’ unwillingness to reopen the issues of their own adolescence and its potential agenda of unfinished business. Freud may have been ordinarily effective in repressing the behavior of adolescence or ordinarily effective in repressing a concrete sense of the experiences he was unable to repress fully, ordinarily in the sense that Freud, not as doctor, but as the bearer of a symptom, may have done little more than most have done. As a result, it is likely that such repressions may have produced their disguised subtexts of meaning in Freud’s theoretical productions, just as such “secrets” fed and ordered the symptoms of his patients, layering them with powerful, if not easily legible, condensates of meaning and significance. The repressed can return through the representations of childhood as well as from the experiences of childhood.
The possibility to be considered is that Freud, who bravely confronted and reported upon his childhood sexual lusts, may have adopted this very discourse as a disguise for the guilt and anxieties of the ordinary adolescent Sigmund. His observation that most of us would more willingly confess our “misdeeds than tell anyone [our] fantasies” (1907:145) applies to Freud himself, as it applies to virtually all who followed in the traditions of both psychoanalysis and the sexual sciences. An issue to be examined is the degree to which, in this case, Freud’s confession of the “sexual sins” of the infant and child were in fact the productions of the fantasies of the adolescent or the degree to which the penetration of childhood amnesia was, in fact, a last-ditch defense of adolescent amnesia, an adolescent amnesia that successive cohorts of behavioral scientists and clinicians might have found equally comfortable, equally seductive, equally self-protective.