Screen Memory - Department of English

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playmates of the childhood memory-scene. There was no love on this occasion: he was at the University, “a slave to my books. I had nothing left over for my cousin.” He believed, however, that his father and uncle had made a plan for him to marry the girl (3.314). The childhood memory emerged on the second occasion, attached to two experiences: desire for Gisela and shame over the financial crisis that had originally caused his father to relocate the family. Freud tells his alter ego that he “projected the two phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory of them. The element about the alpine flowers is as it were a stamp giving the date of manufacture. I can assure you that people often construct such things unconsciously––almost like works of fiction” (3.315). Freud’s later experience of certain yellow flowers in the Alps had helped to trigger this childhood recollection of the meadow scene with its dandelions when he was aged three and still in Freiburg. 5 Do screen memories connect us to our childhood in any way? Freud hesitates among various answers. At times he is positive that there is a connection: "Not only some but all of what is essential from childhood has been retained in these memories . . . . They represent the forgotten years of childhood” (12.148). In the essay, Freud offered a compromise position: You have accepted my assertion that every suppressed 10
phantasy of this kind tends to slip away into a childhood scene. But suppose now that this cannot occur unless there is a memory-trace the content of which offers the phantasy a point of contact–-comes, as it were, half way to meet it . . . . So the phantasy does not coincide completely with the childhood scene. It is only based on it at certain points. That argues in favor of the childhood memory being genuine (3.318-19). Freud resists concluding that screen memories are false but, in his vacillations, thoroughly undermines the validity of childhood memory. The final sentences of the essay suggest that there is no such memory, only screen memories projected back into a mythical childhood: “The raw material of memory-traces out of which [the screen memory] was forged remains unknown to us in its original form.” And the recognition of this fact, he concludes, "must diminish the distinction we have drawn between screen memories and other memories derived from our childhood." Freud ends the essay with a radical challenge to the integrity of early memories: “It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused” (3.322). In an 1898 letter to Fliess, Freud had declared childhood to 11
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Screen Memory - Department of English

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