You may have noticed that at the first sign of fear, children close their eyes. Perhaps they think that if they cannot see, then the fear will go away. This is the logic of the ostrich. On seeing an enemy, the ostrich buries its head in the sand. This way it cannot see the enemy, so it thinks there is no enemy there. What is not seen, does not exist!
Only what is seen, exists. What is the child to do? We have no idea of the child's dilemma. The things that he has been told are bad, are now hidden within himself; he stops looking at them, turns his back on them. It is this turning of the back that gives birth to the unconscious.
Thus, you will be surprised to know that you cannot go back into your memory earlier than when you were four years old. Go back and you will find that your memory stops at a certain point, and you cannot go beyond that point. Five years, four years, three for those who can look back furthest — that's all. There it stops. Those three or four years at the beginning of your life you have completely wiped out. But if you are hypnotized and asked, those memories appear. It is not that the memory was really erased, but just that you have turned your back on it.
Why should you be unable to remember the first four years of your life? Psychologists have been very anxious to know. After all, you were conscious. The child less than four years old lives in a world of conscious experiencing; there are events happening, there are happinesses and unhappinesses happening. Why is their remembrance lost? The scientific finding of psychologists is that we turn our backs on that which makes us unhappy — this is our way of getting rid of unhappiness.
But everybody says that the childhood days were such happy days! Had they really been happy, those memories of the first four years would be available — because we preserve the memories of happiness, it is the unhappiness that we tend to forget. Had childhood been happiness, it would have crystallized in our memory; we would never have lost sight of it. But it is not the whole of our childhood that we remember, and herein lies the reason why we have the idea that childhood was such happiness — because the unhappiness is forgotten. Those four years that we have forgotten have become our unconscious.
It is or this reason that Freud and his followers, who have worked most deeply on the human mind, see it as their first task to restore the lost memories of childhood to their psychiatric patients. All psychoanalysis is the process of going back to the childhood memory. "Whatever your illness today," they say, "its root cause lies hidden in your childhood, and the illness cannot disappear until the cause is uprooted."
All that we have repressed during our childhood will follow us like a shadow throughout our life, influencing our personality and coloring all our actions. You may go mad when you are sixty; but the seed of your madness might be lying in those first four years. Over the years that seed has become a tree, but its roots are in the childhood. If we dig down to those roots and cut them away, the whole tree will die. Hence the preoccupation of psychoanalysis with childhood.
The unconscious is created out of repression. Repression is the child of nonacceptance. Your impulses are lying hidden in your unconscious. Everything that is suppressed is very powerful. Society has labeled it bad because it is powerful. Because society is afraid that if it is not repressed, it is so powerful that it will shatter society to pieces, it will destroy it.
OSHO