TRANSCRIPT
I was recently talking with someone who was telling me some stories about some really terrible things that happened to her son when he was a baby. She said something that I’ve heard many, many people say over the years. I even heard it when I was a kid a lot. She said, “Well, thank God at least it happened to him when he was so little that he doesn’t remember it.” And I say, no, babies remember everything. Little children remember everything. Even if they don’t consciously remember it, they have an unconscious. We all have an unconscious. We record it all. We store it all deep in our psyche and in our bodies. Sometimes I think the stuff that’s buried in our unconscious, the stuff that we can’t consciously remember and recall in an adult fashion—putting pictures together and pieces together and names and putting words on everything—I think sometimes the things that are deeper than that, I think I know these are the things that affect us more. These are the things that actually create the foundations of our personality. This woman telling me these things about her son, her son who I know—I look at him and I say, her son, his confused, troubled, lost life, perverse life, even addicted life is the direct result of all these things that she thinks he can’t remember. And she can live in comfort saying, “Well, at least it happened back then when he can’t remember it.” Oh, but he can! His existence, the confusion and the pain and the torment and the screwed-upness of his existence is the proof that he can remember it all. His life is the memory. He is living the memory every day. And I wonder, why do people think that babies don’t remember and children don’t remember? I think the reason is that they themselves are so absolutely disconnected from their own babyhood and their own toddlerhood. They’re so disconnected with their own infancy, with the emotions of their own infancy, that they also, by extension, can’t relate to other infants, can’t relate to children. And yet, so often, these people who say that babies and children can’t remember, they’re the parents. It’s insanity! I mean, I think of my parents when they let me be circumcised, when they let my genitals be circumcised when I was just born in a hospital in the very city where I’m living now, the very island of Manhattan where I’m living now, more than 50 years ago. They took me, little brand new baby Daniel, just less than an hour old, and put me in the hands of a doctor who brought me in the other room and cut me up with a razor blade without anesthesia. And how did they let this happen? Why did they do this? I mean, they said, “Oh, you know, he won’t remember it. It won’t affect him.” But that’s because they just weren’t connected with how horribly they’d been treated as children themselves. My dad, rejected and unwanted and hated by his own mother, who wanted to abort him, wanted to kill him because she didn’t want another kid. She felt burdened by one already, and here along came a second. But she couldn’t abort him because it was illegal, so she had him, and she hated him and she tormented him. He blocked it all out and, you know, freaked out later when she died and had a breakdown himself. And because he’d never processed any of it, because he couldn’t remember, but his life was the memory. And my mother, the victim of a pedophile, nasty, violent, vicious father and a neglectful mother who pulled back and idealized her husband, idealized my mother’s father, so she let him do anything and never stuck up for my mom. And, you know, my mom, who knows what even happened to my mom when she was very little? Who knows what really even happened to my dad? Because they never put the pieces together. They never really did the exploration. And so they turned me over to some guy who cut me up when I was a newborn baby. That and a thousand other things that, well, they really didn’t care. And they, “Oh, he’ll just forget. He’ll forget.” And yet I see so many things. I think of stories that people have told me, people who have told me, “Yeah, you know, I know for a fact that my little daughter was sexually abused when she was 2 years old, but I don’t want to tell her because she’s forgotten it, and I don’t want it to affect her life.” And yet we look at her daughter, age 15 or 16 or 17, and she’s going out having promiscuous sex all over the place in all sorts of odd ways. And the mom’s like, “Why is she doing this?” And I’m like, “She’s doing this ’cause this is what happened to her. She was treated as a sexual object when she was a baby, and she remembers.” And people who are so terribly violent, and you know, their parents told me, “Yeah, they witnessed a lot of violence when they were a child, but thank God they don’t remember it. They were too young to remember it.” Oh, they remember it! It’s deep in their soul. This is a template of their existence. This is normal to them. I also think people believing that children don’t remember gives them an excuse to violate their own children, torture their own children, sexually abuse their own children, treat their children as objects—objects who won’t remember, not subjects who remember. But I think little children, little babies are the greatest subjects of all. They know everything. They follow everything. I think of an example like my iPhone. Even though it’s not even a new iPhone, it’s an old iPhone, it listens to everything. Like, I notice I’ll see the ads that come up when I’m, you know, watching things on the internet, even watching YouTube. These ads come up, and I’m like, “Wait a second, that ad is related to something that I said to someone inadvertently in a conversation two days ago.” And my phone caught it, caught the word, and put it into its program and, boop, sent it back to me as an ad to try to sell me something. And I think that’s like babies. They’re hearing everything. They’re picking it all up. And all these memories, they become the foundation of the baby’s personality. This and the baby’s true passion, because that’s also what babies have. That’s also what children have. They have a massive, passionate life force. And these distorted, terrible, crazy, traumatizing things, they twist the life force and infect the life force, toxify the life force. But the life force remains. And what I found in my life is these early memories, in all sorts of different ways, are accessible to us. There are ways where we can find out what happened to us. I mean, I know for myself, going back and having lots and lots of conversations with all the adults in my life from when I was a child, starting with my parents long before I broke from them, really trying to figure out what happened to me—going to my grandparents and asking them, going to other adults in my life, talking with my childhood friends and seeing what they could remember and can remember, writing down my history. And also what I’ve found is the more I have resolved my traumas from my later childhood, a window gets opened into earlier years in my life, and more memories come back. It’s like I take one memory and start to resolve it and get deeper into it and figure it out, and boom, that opens a door into the next memory and the next and the next. And I can remember things from much, much, much younger in my life. But even if I can’t remember in a conscious adult way, there’s one other way to remember. There’s one way we all can remember what happened to us when we were young children, and that’s just look in the mirror. Look at our behavior. Look at our social relationships. Look at our dreams. Look at our thoughts. Look at our feelings. When we look at ourselves, when we really study ourselves, study our adult selves, we get a reflection of what happened to us when we were young. Because not only is it still inside of us, it is us.