The Uncanny

Freud opens “Screen Memories” by stating that the theories he will set out are derived from his observations during the psychoanalytic treatment of his patients. Freud claims that “[p]sychological interest in the subject of childhood memories is assured in all cases” (3) because of the difference between children and adults, and the relatively small number of early memories that adults retain from their early years. Freud’s main assertion in this essay is that “a constant relation is established between the psychical significance of an experience and its persistence in the memory” (3). Moreover, Freud claims, pathology is often linked to the forgetting of significant memories.

Freud states that “one would be inclined to assume that the principle of selection [of what to remember and what to forget] was the same for the child as for the adult” (5). Yet this is not the case, Freud says, because frequently children recall banal occurrences with no apparent importance whatsoever. In one case, a child recalls a bowl of ice they had observed during the period their grandmother had died, but no details of her passing. To explain this, Freud says, “we must first ask ourselves why [the memory] suppresses what is significant, but retains what is of no consequence” (6).

There are two psychical forces involved in producing these memories, Freud argues. The importance of the memory is in conflict with resistance. A compromise between the two is reached. This entails an act of displacement, or screening; “[s]ince it was the significant components of the impression that made it objectionable, these must be absent from the memory that replaces it, and so may seem banal” (7). Therefore “if a certain childhood experience asserts itself in the memory, this is not because it is golden, but because it has lain beside gold” (7).

Freud then takes the example of a female neurotic patient in whom certain passages of Otto Ludwig’s Heiterethei aroused distressing thoughts, causing other, innocuous passages to appear in her memory with “pathological force” (8). From this, Freud deduces that there are “intimate links” between “the mental life of the child and the psychical material of neuroses” (8). Freud now takes up the case of a 38-year-old man who came to him with a minor phobia. The analysis of his childhood memories is represented at length for the duration of the essay.

This patient’s most enduring childhood memory is of a lush meadow, filled with yellow flowers. A nursemaid and farmer’s wife are talking outside a farmhouse and three children, including himself, are playing in the field. The other children are his male cousin, who is a year older than himself, and his female cousin, who is the same age as Freud’s patient. The little girl has a beautiful bunch of the flowers, and the boys snatch it from her. The little girl runs in tears to the women, whom give her black bread, which the boys, discarding the flowers, decide they also want, and are given some.

Freud’s subsequent interpretation links the yellow of the dandelions with the yellow dress of the man’s first love. The country bread is an imagined experience that replicates the comfortable life that the man felt he could have lived had he been allowed to stay in the country and married his first love, rather than struggling in the city to earn his “daily bread” (14).

Discarding the flowers in favor of the bread represents the man’s father’s plan for him, which involved a practical life in the city. The construction of this mostly-imagined memory is “date marked” Freud argues, by the alpine flowers the man remembered seeing on a trip to the Alps, which filled the field in his screen memory. Furthermore, the innocent childhood setting served to hide two suppressed desires: 1) the urge to deflower his first love, and 2) to secure material comfort. The construction of the memory, Freud argues, is the consequence of a fantasy about what the man’s life might have been like had he married her. Freud emphasizes the similarities between memory formation and the development of hysterical symptoms. The essay concludes, “a number of motives that were far removed from the aim of historical fidelity had a hand in influencing the formation and the selection of the memories” (21).