As already mentioned, childhood amnesia is not necessarily due to repression. In
addition to possibly being due to retroactive interference, cue-related forgetting, and failure to use Type 2 rehearsal, you may not be able to remember your early years because
- You weren't using words often enough or well enough (especially during your first year) to make episodic memories--memories that seem to involve storing and retrieving words.
- You probably had little sense of self (especially during your first 18 months)-- and episodic memory is about what the self did.
- Your hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex--two brain areas heavily involved in episodic memory----were not well developed before age 3.
- Your early episodic memories may have been deleted during the extensive pruning that occurs in the brain around age 3.