From Freud’s theories, I’ve learned that things happened during early childhood can have a quite significant impact on an individual’s personality. Maybe it’s a coincidence that every parent is trying their best to create or give their kids wonderful memories. But according to my personal throwback experience on the module “Memoir”, I’ve found most of my baby memories on the traumatic side. Never would I associate these with my current self if I didn’t know that there’s a link to these memories and what I’m made of. Writing the assignment “The Sphinx’s Riddle”, I was pleasantly surprised with how many little details I actually remembered. Although thinking of it only would give just a blur, writing it down was a total different story. From my experience, with writing, I recalled not not only emotions, but scents, colors, textures and thoughts from when I was a baby. From what I see, there are two parts of how memory shapes the self. One of them is psychological wise. I can’t explain thoroughly but somehow, those early memories stored deep inside our brain as groups of neuron is impacting our current life. The second one is about short term memory. We are human and cannot choose to unsee, unhear or unknow something. Therefore we constantly get reminded of what happened or what we did. That to me has the bigger impact on our life than long term memory does. From they way we think, the way we interact with people and how we choose to live our life, this is how memory shapes the “self”.
