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The author’s premise is that the child uses memory traces, in the Freudian sense, rather than memories. These traces are, for the most part, the result of parental projections. In fact, children seem to have no interest in what we call autobiographical memory; the author refers to children’s shared memory, where their attention is essentially directed at the future rather than the past. In summary, childhood amnesia appears to be much more significant in children than in adults. Two clinical cases are used to demonstrate the author’s hypotheses and illustrate some of the particular aspects of counter-transference in children’s analysis.