for freedom; he left his family and his estate; he died as a free man at a railway station in an out-of-the-way corner of the Russian Empire. It was his last station indeed. What he yearned for as a child and could not attain because he was swaddled in diapers, he could achieve at a time when the wings of death were rushing around him, and bringing back to him what he considered his first memory.
My own first recollection is less dramatic. It seems indifferent, without emotion and without importance. How could it linger in my memory if my inner-self had not been strongly stirred?
I see the house in which we lived after moving from Boyan. It stands at the crossroads; there is a simple cart in which my grandmother is sitting; after a short visit with us she was going back to Boyan. Now I see with my mind’s eye how my mother gives her a lemon to suck for refreshment on the trip.
I would explain this memory as the jealousy of the little boy because his mother has neglected him in the presence of the grandmother. Indeed, I have a second memory that may confirm this supposition. Grandmother died. Mother returned in excitement from the funeral. She told how, after Grandmother’s death, neighbors had ransacked the dead woman’s house and stolen many objects. My feeling was a mixture of surprise and malignant joy.
Before this, something happened that determined my whole life. I visited my grandmother in Boyan, walked in the “main street,” that is, the one street of the village. A little girl called to me. She gave me a bunch of cherries and asked me to play with her. We played the favorite game of children, “father and mother.” My playmate was partly the hostess and partly the servant. I alternated between the role of a host and that of a visitor. (Now there is a gap in my mind.) Nearby is an improvised shed which I remember distinctly. Carpenters had placed boards in such a way as to form a pyramid-like structure. They had nailed the boards together in order to provide a shelter against the rain. We entered the shed and looked cautiously around us. Then we continued to play “father and mother,” and this time we enjoyed the physical side of our “marriage.”
How did the knowledge of this natural procedure come into my brain? Was it an inherited instinct, or the imitation of something observed in my parents’ home? I cannot decide, but I know that the realization we had done something forbidden came to us both. It was already dark. We crept shyly away from our hiding place and looked around. Did a peasant pass? Did we hear voices of wayfarers? This part is hazy, but I visualize us leaving the shack hand in hand and walking up to our elders. They must have been astonished that we came home so late.4
I cannot remember any more of my relationship with this girl. I was probably two-and-a-half years old. (Incidentally, thirty years later, I was the physician of this same girl. She was married and had two children. I asked her whether she remembered our play, and I was astonished to hear that it had completely disappeared from her memory. She only recalled that my older brother once knocked her down and she showed me a little scar which resulted from this assault. A distinct “screen memory.”)
Did I see my little wife a second time? I do not know. I see myself riding home in a simple cart in which there are many grown-ups. I am entrusted to the care of a man during the trip which requires one hour. I have a small wooden flute like those which peasants make. I try to play on it. The flute falls from my hand to the road. I cry bitterly. The carriage stops. Some of the men go down to look for the flute. The passengers are in a hurry. They shout to the driver, “Go on! Go on!” The cart rumbles and creaks over the dusty road. I sadly look back. My crying has been in vain. The hot sun presses the tears against my cheeks. The wonderful flute is lost forever.
How can I learn why this scene is engraved so deeply in my memory? Was the flute the symbol of the lost girl? Does the loss represent the loss of my sweetheart? Have I taken this scene from the treasure-house of my memories and kept it because it reminds me of the beautiful words, “Everything that passes by is only a smile”?
Do we really know what processes occur in a child’s brain? Most of us forget our own childhood except for a few scattered images. What Freud calls “repression” seems to represent a purely protective function of our psychic life. To live means to forget things which make life painful. One of my patients who suffered from agoraphobia confessed to me that she had often played improperly with her son. The boy had shared her bed from infancy until some time after puberty. The woman abruptly stopped having sexual intimacies with her son and behaved irreproachably thenceforth. She tried to erase the effects of her earlier mistakes by giving her son an excellent education. Following her recovery I heard nothing of the patient or her son for a long time. One day a twenty-one-year-old man, the patient’s son, came to see me in my office. He suffered from depressions and one of my experienced assistants took over his treatment, after I informed the doctor of the salient facts I knew from the mother. My assistant and I waited tensely for weeks and months to see whether our patient would recall his embarrassing childhood experiences; he did not.
It is hard to determine whether he did not wish or was unable to recall. The analysis suggested that he re-lived these early impressions in his day-dreams and that it was apparently this factor that was responsible for his inability to concentrate and for his depressions. However, when the analysis came close to the problem in question, the patient displayed the “flight reflex” and discontinued the treatment.
But to return to the “central character” and good chronological order. From my first memories emerge a lot of irrelevant ones. I know I was not a model child. I was wild, stubborn, defiant; I was a problem child and very difficult to bring up. My mother had a remarkable principle: each human being must have a time in his life in which he can storm out his temperament. She read this sentence in some book or she heard it in the theater, but it was her principle, and she used to say, “It’s better my child storms now than later.”
Marysia had gone, and my poor mother had the whole burden of the naughty boy; but she never lost her patience, and I was never physically punished by her.
After the death of my grandmother we moved to a place where many houses stood in a circle around a big court; nearby were large lawns and gardens. There were a lot of “good-for-nothing” boys and girls; we liked to climb over the fence into a big orchard which was not used, and therefore neglected and growing wild, and this orchard was our playground. Usually we played cops and robbers, but also many less innocent games and we had many talks on the riddle of sex. The story of the innocence of children is a fairy tale. Whoever insists on the truth of this fairy tale does not know children, for when not directly controlled by adults, they soon show their true nature.
I do not remember the first day I went to school (a milestone for every child). I was so engrossed in my daydreams and games that school and learning were intensely boring. I remember some teachers, some pranks, some wanton talks with other boys; in class, I did not pay attention to the lectures. The results were miserable. I had the worst possible marks and frequently was “kept in” to learn my lessons.
Suppose that a teacher or a doctor had examined me at that time; he would have stated that I was not fit for school and, perhaps, that I was a backward child. I have often had the opportunity to console parents who complained about their children’s bad marks in the elementary school. Many “slow” children live in a world of fantasy which is stronger than anything else. The world of fairy tales gives them more pleasure than that of reality. I want to emphasize that I was not the only naughty child; there were dozens and dozens like myself. Later they became virtuous citizens; some were successes, some were failures.
BOOKS
We moved again. Now I attended a Protestant, coeducational school, which was known as a model school. My teachers were kind, the spirit of the school was excellent, the teaching was stimulating. The children were from a higher social stratum than were my earlier classmates. There were none of the roughnecks of the
