An interesting read by Cristen Conger.
Can a person remember being born?
Think back to your earliest memory. Perhaps images of a birthday party or scenes from a family vacation come to mind. Now think about your age when that event occurred. Chances are that earliest recollection extends no further back than your third birthday. In fact, you can probably come up with only a handful of memories from between the ages of 3 and 7, although family photo albums or other cues may trigger more.
Psychologists refer to this inability of most adults to remember events from early life, including their birth, as childhood amnesia. Sigmund Freud first coined the term infantile amnesia, now more broadly referred to as childhood amnesia, as early as 1899 to explain his adult patients' scarcity of childhood memories [source: Rapaport]. Freud proposed that people use it as a means of repressing traumatic, and often sexual, urgings during that time. To block those unconscious drives of the id, Freud claimed that humans create screen memories, or revised versions of events, to protect the conscious ego.
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