Autobiographies, stories and testimonies: Role and meaning of childhood memories

Childhood memories are present in most literary, philosophical or even scientific writings. To speak of oneself means to give priority to certain periods of one's life, to omit others and to give childhood memories a place that can change the meaning and objectives of the narrative. By using the analytical method, the author from biographies that have marked history, questions the functions of childhood memory in the construction of the narrative of one's own life. The author successively analyses the theoretical quarrels about the age of the first memory, the links with the characteristics of memory, the place of childhood memories in the forms of the biographical narrative with the current shift towards fiction, dominant themes among life events and relationship to the psychopathological clinic. The nature of the memory, the time elapsed between the moment it is placed and the moment it is narrated, seems difficult to specify. The same is true of the amplification or cancellation of what happened, especially as other life events intervened, sometimes traumatic. It analyses the underlying elements of self-knowledge and the deviations induced by the new pressures of the media world that make every story slip into fiction. (C) 2021 Published by Elsevier Masson SAS.