Freud, 1916–1917/1963; Rank, 1924/ Memories From the Cradle

How far back can we, as adults, remember details of our life experiences? Current pop-ular and scientific beliefs are contradictory, with the latter stipulating that personal mem-ories do not begin until the late preschool years (age 4–5 years) and the former claiming that we not only remember being born, but can also remember in utero experiences. In this re-view, these beliefs are exam-ined in a scientific context and evaluated in terms of empirical data about the development of early memory. The theory pro-posed here is that memories for personal experiences are not possible until the advent of the cognitive self, around the age of 18 to 24 months. This age is much earlier than that proposed as the age of the ear-liest memories in other scien-tific accounts and much later than that proposed in popular beliefs about early memory. New data from a cross-sec-tional and longitudinal study of early memory development and the emergence of the self clearly show the origins of per-sonal memory coincide with the emergence of the early self. Keywords autobiographical memory; early memory; self and memory The debate concerning whether memories from our earliest days per-sist dates back to the early philoso-phers and, in psychology, to the be-ginnings of the 20th century (e.g.