Freud - Complete Works (201 page)

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1138

   In the paper which I have
mentioned I only touched on and in no way exhausted the
multiplicity of the relations and meanings of screen memories. In
the example quoted there, of which I gave a detailed analysis, I
laid special stress on the peculiarity of the
chronological
relation between the screen memory and the content which is
screened off by it. In that example the content of the screen
memory belonged to one of the earliest years of childhood, while
the mental experiences which were replaced by it in the memory and
which had remained almost unconscious occurred in the
subject’s later life, I described this sort of displacement
as a
retroactive
or
retrogressive
one. The opposite
relation is found perhaps still more frequently: an indifferent
impression of recent date establishes itself in the memory as a
screen memory, although it owes that privilege merely to its
connection with an earlier experience which resistances prevent
from being reproduced directly. These would be screen memories that
have
pushed ahead
or been
displaced forward
. Here the
essential thing with which the memory is occupied
precedes
the screen memory in time. Finally, we find yet a third
possibility, in which the screen memory is connected with the
impression that it screens not only by its content but also by
contiguity in time: these are
contemporary
or
contiguous
screen memories.

   How large a part of our store of
memory falls into the category of screen memories, and what role
they play in various neurotic thought-processes, are problems whose
significance I neither discussed in my earlier paper nor shall
enter into here. My only concern is to emphasize the similarity
between the forgetting of proper names accompanied by paramnesia,
and the formation of screen memories.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1139

   At first sight the differences
between the two phenomena are much more striking than any analogies
that may be found. The former phenomenon relates to proper names;
the latter to whole impressions, things experienced either in
reality or in thought. In the former we have a manifest failure of
the function of memory; in the latter, an act of memory that
strikes us as strange. In the former it is a case of momentary
disturbance - for the name that has just been forgotten may have
been produced correctly a hundred times before, and from tomorrow
may be produced once again; in the latter it is a case of a
permanent and constant memory, since the indifferent childhood
memories seem to have the power of staying with us through a large
part of our life. The problem in these two cases appears to be
quite differently focused. In the former it is the forgetting, in
the latter the retention which arouses our scientific curiosity.
Closer study reveals that in spite of the dissimilarity between the
two phenomena in regard to their psychical material and their
duration, the points at which they agree far outbalance it. Both
have to do with mistakes in remembering: what the memory reproduces
is not what it should correctly have reproduced, but something else
as a substitute. In the case of the forgetting of names the act of
memory occurs, though in the form of substitute names; the case of
the formation of screen memories has as its basis a forgetting of
other more important impressions. In both instances an intellectual
feeling gives us information of interference by some disturbing
factor; but it takes two different forms. With the forgetting of
names we
know
that the substitute names are
false
:
with screen memories we are
surprised
that we possess them
at all. If, now, psychological analysis establishes that the
substitutive formation has come about in the same way in both
cases, by means of displacement along a superficial association, it
is precisely the dissimilarities between the two phenomena, in
regard to their material, their duration and their focal point,
which serve to heighten our expectation that we have discovered
something of importance and of general validity. This general
principle would assert that when the reproducing function fails or
goes astray, the occurrence points, far more frequently than we
suspect, to interference by a tendentious factor - that is, by a
purpose
which favours one memory while striving to work
against another.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1140

   The subject of childhood memories
seems to me to be of such significance and interest that I should
like to devote to it a few additional observations which go beyond
the views that I have so far expressed.

   How far back into childhood do
our memories extend? I am familiar with a few investigations into
this question, such as those by V. and C. Henri (1897) and by
Potwin (1901). They show that great individual differences exist
among the persons examined: a few assign their earliest memories to
the sixth month of life, while others remember nothing of their
lives up to the end of their sixth or even eighth year. But with
what are these differences in retaining childhood memories
connected, and what significance attaches to them? Clearly it is
not sufficient to assemble the material for answering these points
by means of a questionnaire; what is required in addition is that
it should be worked over - a process in which the person supplying
the information must participate.

   In my opinion we take the fact of
infantile amnesia - the loss, that is, of the memories of the first
years of our life - much too easily; and we fail to look upon it as
a strange riddle. We forget how high are the intellectual
achievements and how complicated the emotional impulses of which a
child of some four years is capable, and we ought to be positively
astonished that the memory of later years has as a rule preserved
so little of these mental processes, especially as we have every
reason to suppose that these same forgotten childhood achievements
have not, as might be thought, slipped away without leaving their
mark on the subject’s development, but have exercised a
determining influence for the whole of his later life. And in spite
of this unique efficacy they have been forgotten!  This
suggests that there are conditions for remembering (in the sense of
conscious reproducing) of a quite special kind, which have evaded
recognition by us up to now. It may very well be that the
forgetting of childhood can supply us with the key to the
understanding of those amnesias which lie, according to our more
recent discoveries, at the basis of the formation of all neurotic
symptoms.

   Of the childhood memories that
have been retained a few strike us as perfectly understandable,
while others seem odd or unintelligible. It is not difficult to
correct certain errors regarding both sorts. If the memories that a
person has retained are subjected to an analytic enquiry, it is
easy to establish that there is no guarantee of their accuracy.
Some of the mnemic images are certainly falsified, incomplete or
displaced in time and place. Any such statement by the subjects of
the enquiry as that their first recollection comes from about their
second year is clearly not to be trusted. Moreover, motives can
soon be discovered which make the distortion and displacement of
the experience intelligible, but which show at the same time that
these mistakes in recollection cannot be caused simply by a
treacherous memory. Strong forces from later life have been at work
on the capacity of childhood experiences for being remembered -
probably the same forces which are responsible for our having
become so far removed in general from understanding our years of
childhood.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1141

   Remembering in adults, as is well
known, makes use of a variety of psychical material. Some people
remember in visual images; their memories have a visual character .
Other people can scarcely reproduce in their memory even the
scantiest outlines of what they have experienced. Following
Charcot’s proposal, such people are called
auditifs
and
moteurs
in contrast to the
visuels
. In dreams
these distinctions disappear: we all dream predominantly in visual
images. But this development is similarly reversed in the case of
childhood memories: they are plastically visual even in people
whose later function of memory has to do without any visual
element. Visual memory accordingly preserves the type of infantile
memory. In my own case the earliest childhood memories are the only
ones of a visual character: they are regular scenes worked out in
plastic form, comparable only to representations on the stage. In
these scenes of childhood, whether in fact they prove to be true or
falsified, what one sees invariably includes oneself as a child,
with a child’s shape and clothes. This circumstance must
cause surprise: in their recollections of later experiences adult
visuels
no longer see themselves.¹ Furthermore it
contradicts all that we have learnt to suppose that in his
experiences a child’s attention is directed to himself
instead of exclusively to impressions from outside. One is thus
forced by various considerations to suspect that in the so-called
earliest childhood memories we possess not the genuine memory-trace
but a later revision of it, a revision which may have been
subjected to the influences of a variety of later psychical forces.
Thus the ‘childhood memories’ of individuals come in
general to acquire the significance of ‘screen
memories’ and in doing so offer a remarkable analogy with the
childhood memories that a nation preserves in its store of legends
and myths.

  
¹
This statement is based on a number of
enquiries I have made.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1142

   Anyone who has investigated a
number of people psychologically by the method of psycho-analysis
will in the course of his work have collected numerous examples of
every kind of screen memory. However, the reporting of these
examples is made extraordinarily difficult owing to the nature of
the relations, which I have just discussed, between childhood
memories and later life. In order to show that a childhood memory
is to be regarded as a screen memory, it would often be necessary
to present the complete life history of the person in question.
Only rarely is it possible to lift a single screen memory out of
its context in order to give an account of it, as in the following
good example.

   A man of twenty-four has
preserved the following picture from his fifth year. He is sitting
in the garden of a summer villa, on a small chair beside his aunt,
who is trying to teach him the letters of the alphabet. He is in
difficulties over the difference between
m
and
n
and
he asks his aunt to tell him how to know one from the other. His
aunt points out to him that the
m
has a whole piece more
than the
n
- the third stroke. There appeared to be no
reason for challenging the trustworthiness of this childhood
memory; it had, however, only acquired its meaning at a later date,
when it showed itself suited to represent symbolically another of
the boy’s curiosities. For just as at that time he wanted to
know the difference between
m
and
n
, so later he was
anxious to find out the difference between boys and girls, and
would have been very willing for this particular aunt to be the one
to teach him. He also discovered then that the difference was a
similar one - that a boy, too, has a whole piece more than a girl;
and at the time when he acquired this piece of knowledge he called
up the recollection of the parallel curiosity of his childhood.

   Here is another example, from the
later years of childhood. A man who is severely inhibited in his
erotic life, and who is now over forty, is the eldest of nine
children. At the time that the youngest of his brothers and sisters
was born he was fifteen, yet he maintains firmly and obstinately
that he had never noticed any of his mother’s pregnancies.
Under pressure from my scepticism a memory presented itself to him:
once at the age of eleven or twelve he had seen his mother
hurriedly
unfasten
her skirt in front of the mirror. He now
added of his own accord that she had come in from the street and
had been overcome by unexpected labour pains. The unfastening of
the skirt was a screen memory for the confinement. We shall come
across the use of ‘verbal bridges’ of this kind in
further cases.

The Psychopathology Of Everyday Life

1143

   I should like now to give a
single example of the way in which a childhood memory, which
previously appeared to have no meaning, can acquire one as a result
of being worked over by analysis. When I began in my forty-third
year to direct my interest to what was left of my memory of my own
childhood there came to my mind a scene which had for a long while
back (from the remotest past, as it seemed to me) come into
consciousness from time to time, and which I had good evidence for
assigning to a date before the end of my third year. I saw myself
standing in front of a cupboard demanding something and screaming,
while my half-brother, my senior by twenty years, held it open.
Then suddenly my mother, looking beautiful and slim, walked into
the room, as if she had come in from the street. These were the
words in which I described the scene, of which I had a plastic
picture, but I did not know what more I could make of it. Whether
my brother wanted to open or shut the cupboard - in my first
translation of the picture I called it a ‘wardrobe’ -
why I was crying, and what the arrival of my mother had to do with
it all this was obscure to me. The explanation I was tempted to
give myself was that what was in question was a memory of being
teased by my elder brother and of my mother putting a stop to it.
Such misunderstandings of a childhood scene which is preserved in
the memory are by no means rare: a situation is recalled, but it is
not clear what its central point is, and one does not know on which
of its elements the psychical accent is to be placed. Analytic
effort led me to take a quite unexpected view of the picture. I had
missed my mother, and had come to suspect that she was shut up in
this wardrobe or cupboard; and it was for that reason that I was
demanding that my brother should open the cupboard. When he did
what I asked and I had made certain that my mother was not in the
cupboard, I began to scream. This is the moment that my memory has
held fast; and it was followed at once by the appearance of my
mother, which allayed my anxiety or longing. But how did the child
get the idea of looking for his absent mother in the cupboard?
Dreams which I had at the same time contained obscure allusions to
a nurse of whom I had other recollections, such as, for example,
that she used to insist on my dutifully handing over to her the
small coins I received as presents - a detail which can itself
claim to have the value of a screen memory for later experiences. I
accordingly resolved that this time I would make the problem of
interpretation easier for myself and would ask my mother, who was
by then grown old, about the nurse. I learned a variety of details,
among them that this clever but dishonest person had carried out
considerable thefts in the house during my mother’s
confinement and had been taken to court on a charge preferred by my
half-brother. This information threw a flood of light on the
childhood scene, and so enabled me to understand it. The sudden
disappearance of the nurse had not been a matter of indifference to
me: the reason why I had turned in particular to this brother, and
had asked him where she was, was probably because I had noticed
that he played a part in her disappearance; and he had answered in
the elusive and punning fashion that was characteristic of him:
‘She’s "boxed up".’ At the time, I
understood this answer in a child’s way, but I stopped asking
any more questions as there was nothing more to learn. When my
mother left me a short while later, I suspected that my naughty
brother had done the same thing to her that he had done to the
nurse and I forced him to open the cupboard for me. I now
understand, too, why in the translation of this visual childhood
scene my mother’s slimness was emphasized: it must have
struck me as having just been restored to her. I am two and a half
years older than the sister who was born at that time, and when I
was three years old my half-brother and I ceased living in the same
place.¹