Screen Memory - Department of English

they also tell a relatively insignificant story; and this is the
screening designed to protect their catastrophic importance. Like
so many items in Freud’s mental universe, they must be read
through their opposites; in this case: after childhood,
unpleasant, significant. The subject of memory is thus a huge
enigma for Freud.
After finishing the essay, Freud told Wilhelm Fliess that he
had liked the paper “immensely” while producing it, “which does
not augur well for its future” (1985:351). Approaching the
subject in a spirit of common-sense rationalism, he assumes that
memories are retained and reproduced in direct proportion to
their importance. In the case of childhood memories this law
seems to be reversed, and Freud pretends to be astonished by
these “mnemic images, whose innocence makes them so mysterious”:
“I feel surprised at forgetting something important; and I feel
even more surprised, perhaps, at remembering something apparently
indifferent” (3.306 and 303). We find, Freud says, such
displacement strange to contemplate.
Screen memories, then, work to conceal “an unsuspected
wealth of meaning . . . behind their apparent innocence”: “They
relate to [repressed] impressions of a sexual and aggressive
nature, and no doubt also to early injuries to the ego
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(narcissistic mortifications)” (3.309 and 23.74). Freud
characterized them as “‘mnemic residues’ which take on a
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