the importance of the childish precursors of sexuality disappears completely as a rule, only leaving behind certain traces.
If in later life an impediment arises, so that the damming of the libido reanimates the old by-paths, the condition thus excited is properly a new one, and something abnormal.
The former condition of the child is normal usage of the libido, whilst the return of the libido towards the childish past is something abnormal. Therefore, in my opinion, it is an erroneous terminology to call the infantile sexual manifestations "perversions," for it is not permissible to give normal manifestations pathological terms. This erroneous usage seems to be responsible for the confusion of the scientific public. The terms employed in neurotic psychology have been misapplied here, under the assumption that the abnormal by-paths of the libido discovered in neurotic people are the same phenomena as are to be found in children.
The Infantile Amnesia Criticized
The so-called amnesia of childhood, which plays an important part in the "Three Contributions," is a similar illegitimate retrograde application from pathology. Amnesia is a pathological condition, consisting in the repression of certain contents of the conscious. This condition cannot possibly be the same as the antegrade amnesia of children, which consists in an incapacity for intentional reproduction, a condition we find also among savages. This incapacity for reproduction dates from birth, and can be understood on obvious anatomical and biological grounds. It would be a strange hypothesis were we willing to regard this totally different quality of early infantile consciousness as one to be attributed to repression, in analogy with the condition in neurosis. The amnesia of neurosis is punched out, as it were, from the continuity of memory, but the remembrances of earlier childhood exist in separate islands in the continuity of the non-memory. This condition is the opposite in every sense of the condition of neurosis, so that the expression "amnesia," generally used for this condition, is incorrect. The "amnesia of childhood" is a conclusion a posteriori from the psychology of neurosis, just as is the "polymorphic perverse" disposition of the child.
