Screen Memory - Department of English

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compulsive quality as they act to protect the subject from repressed trauma or desire” (19.20 and Furnari). These memories are of course not completely fabricated; they incorporate actual memory-traces. Each of the details that makes up the representation, Serge Leclaire states, “is evidently borrowed from a different context and assembled into the uncertain composite image” (78). Screen memories are apparent memories of one's earliest years that are actually formed during other periods of emotional arousal. The retrogressive screen memory is constructed at the site of a later event, out of psychic events from many periods of our lives, and organized into a strong, clear memory: “In these [later] periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves" (3.322). In 1899, Freud proclaimed a law of childhood amnesia which stipulated that memory does not function until the fourth or fifth year and if a memory carrying an earlier date stamp does arise, it is invariably false. This is not due to fading memory or psychological development, but blockage (distinguishing, as he says so, between a memory and a memory-trace). Memory is, in fact, operative much earlier: 4
No one calls in question the fact that the experiences of the earliest years of our childhood leave ineradicable traces in the depths of our minds. If, however, we seek in our memories to ascertain what were the impressions that were destined to influence us to the ends of our lives, the outcome is either nothing at all or a relatively small number of isolated recollections which are often of dubious or enigmatic importance (3.303). 2 By way of contrast, Vico had claimed that children have exceptionally strong memories, and Ribot felt that “The earliest memories are the most secure and solid of all” (Roth 1989:56). Diderot had simply declared that “The time of childhood is the time of memory” (Poulet 198). And certainly no childhood amnesia operates in Proust when he is blessed with the receipt of his entire childhood in Combray. Like most entities in Freud’s mental universe, screen memories both conceal and express past meaning. They are a double formation: “Two psychical forces are concerned in bringing about memories of this sort. One of these forces takes the importance of the experience as a motive for seeking to remember it, while the other--a resistance--tries to prevent any such preference from being shown” (3.306-7). In addition to pleasure and triviality, screen memories are 5
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Screen Memory - Department of English

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