Screen Memory - Department of English

I have at my disposal a fair number of early memories
of childhood which I can date with great certainty . .
. all these memories of mine relate to my birthplace
and therefore date from my second and third years. They
are mostly short scenes, but they are very well
preserved and furnished with every detail of sense-
perception, in complete contrast to my memories of
adult years, which are entirely lacking in the visual
element (3.309).
Freud is the patient in fact if not in behavior; this therapeutic
transcription was quasi-autobiographical.
The patient soon comes to know that the experience
registered by this memory never occurred. All the analyst has to
do to dispel it is ask whether this memory had recurred
“periodically since his childhood, or whether it had perhaps
emerged at some later time,” and the patient immediately knows
that this childhood memory never occurred in his earlier years
(3.312). He can, however, identify its later trigger, “the
occasion which led to my recovering this and many other
recollections of my earliest childhood”: a return visit to
Frieburg at seventeen where he nourished a secret love for
Gisella Fluss, the fifteen-year old daughter of the family with
whom he had previously stayed (3.312-23). He then recalls a
second “occasion” three years later when he again saw the two
9