Screen Memory - Department of English

on her head and a children's nurse.”
We are picking the yellow flowers and each of us is
holding a bunch of flowers we have already picked. The
little girl has the best bunch; and, as though by
mutual agreement, we--the two boys--fall on her and
snatch away her flowers. She runs up the meadow in
tears and as a consolation the peasant-woman gives her
a big piece of black bread. Hardly have we seen this
than we throw the flowers away, hurry to the cottage,
and ask to be given some bread too. And we are in fact
given some; the peasant-woman cuts the loaf with a long
knife. In my memory the bread tastes quite delicious--
and at that point the scene breaks off (3.311).
Freud distinguished three types of screen memory: an early
memory screening an equally early experience, a late memory
screening a childhood event [the “pushed forward” variety], and
retrogressive screen memory, in which a childhood memory screens
a later concern (3.320). Freud suggested that C. F. Meyer's novel
The Monk's Wedding
magnificently illustrates the process occurring in
later years in the formation of fantasies . . . . a new
experience is in fantasy projected back into the past
so that the new persons become aligned with the old
ones, who become their prototypes. The mirror image of
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