Freud - Complete Works (83 page)

Screen Memories

496

   Then I am inclined to believe
that the childhood scene we are considering emerged at this time,
when you were struggling for your daily bread - provided, that is,
that you can confirm my idea that it was during this same period
that you first made the acquaintance of the Alps.

   ‘Yes, that is so:
mountaineering was the one enjoyment that I allowed myself at that
time. But I still cannot grasp your point.’

   I am coming to it at once. The
element on which you put most stress in your childhood scene was
the fact of the country-made bread tasting so delicious. It seems
clear that this idea, which amounted almost to a hallucination,
corresponded to your phantasy of the comfortable life you would
have led if you had stayed at home and married this girl - or, in
symbolic language, of how sweet the bread would have tasted for
which you had to struggle so hard in your later years. The yellow
of the flowers, too, points to the same girl. But there are also
elements in the childhood scene which can only be related to the
second
phantasy - of being married to your cousin. Throwing
away the flowers in exchange for bread strikes me as not a bad
disguise for the scheme your father had for you: you were to give
up your unpractical ideals and take on a
‘bread-and-butter’ occupation, were you not?

   ‘It seems then that I
amalgamated the two sets of phantasies of how my life could have
been more comfortable -the "yellow" and the
"country-made bread" from the one and the throwing away
of the flowers and the actual people concerned from the
other.’

   Yes. You projected the two
phantasies on to one another and made a childhood memory of them.
The element about the Alpine flowers is as it were a stamp giving
the date of manufacture. I can assure you that people often
construct such things unconsciously - almost like works of
fiction.

   ‘But if that is so, there
was
no
childhood memory, but only a phantasy put back into
childhood. A feeling tells me, though, that the scene is genuine.
How does that fit in?’

   There is in general no guarantee
of the data produced by our memory. But I am ready to agree with
you that the scene is genuine. If so, you selected it from
innumerable others of a similar or another kind because, on account
of its content (which in itself was indifferent) it was well
adapted to represent the two phantasies, which were important
enough to you. A recollection of this kind, whose value lies in the
fact that it represents in the memory impressions and thoughts of a
later date whose content is connected with its own by symbolic or
similar links, may appropriately be called a ‘
screen
memory
’. In any case you will cease to feel any surprise
that this scene should so often recur to your mind. It can no
longer be regarded as an innocent one since, as we have discovered,
it is calculated to illustrate the most momentous turning-points in
your life, the influence of the two most powerful motive forces -
hunger and love.

Screen Memories

 
497

   ‘Yes, it represented hunger
well enough. But what about love?’

   In the yellow of the flowers, I
mean. But I cannot deny that in this childhood scene of yours love
is represented far less prominently than I should have expected
from my previous experience.

   ‘No. You are mistaken. The
essence of it is its representation of love. Now I understand for
the first time. Think for a moment! Taking flowers away from a girl
means to deflower her. What a contrast between the boldness of this
phantasy and my bashfulness on the first occasion and my
indifference on the second.’

   I can assure you that youthful
bashfulness habitually has as its complement bold phantasies of
that sort.

   ‘But in that case the
phantasy that has transformed itself into these childhood memories
would not be a conscious one that I can remember, but an
unconscious one?’

   Unconscious thoughts which are a
prolongation of conscious ones. You think to yourself ‘If I
had married so-and-so’, and behind the thought there is an
impulse to form a picture of what the ‘being married’
really is.

   ‘I can go on with it now
myself. The most seductive part of the whole subject for a young
scapegrace is the picture of the marriage night. (What does he care
about what comes afterwards?) But that picture cannot venture out
into the light of day: the dominating mood of diffidence and of
respect towards the girl keeps it suppressed. So it remains
unconscious-'

Screen Memories

498

   And slips away into a childhood
memory. You are quite right. It is precisely the coarsely sensual
element in the phantasy which explains why it does not develop into
a
conscious
phantasy but must be content to find its way
allusively and under a flowery disguise into a childhood scene.

   ‘But why precisely, into a
childhood
scene, I should like to know?’

   For the sake of its innocence,
perhaps. Can you imagine a greater contrast to these designs for
gross sexual aggression than childish pranks? However, there are
more general grounds that have a decisive influence in bringing
about the slipping away of repressed thoughts and wishes into
childhood memories: for you will find the same thing invariably
happening in hysterical patients. It seems, moreover, as though the
recollection of the remote past is in itself facilitated by some
pleasurable motive:
forsan et haec olim meminisse
juvabit
.¹

   ‘If that is so, I have lost
all faith in the genuineness of the dandelion scene. This is how I
look at it: On the two occasions in question, and with the support
of very comprehensible realistic motives, the thought occurred to
me: "If you had married this or that girl, your life would
have become much pleasanter." The sensual current in my mind
took hold of the thought which is contained in the protasis and
repeated it in images of a kind capable of giving that same sensual
current satisfaction. This second version of the thought remained
unconscious on account of its incompatibility with the dominant
sexual disposition; but this very fact of its remaining unconscious
enabled it to persist in my mind long after changes in the real
situation had quite got rid of the conscious version. In
accordance, as you say, with a general law, the clause that had
remained unconscious sought to transform itself into a childhood
scene which, on account of its innocence, would be able to become
conscious. With this end in view it had to undergo a fresh
transformation, or rather two fresh transformations. One of these
removed the objectionable element from the protasis by expressing
it figuratively; the second forced the apodosis into a shape
capable of visual representation - using for the purpose the
intermediary ideas of "bread" and "bread-and-butter
occupations". I see that by producing a phantasy like this I
was providing, as it were, a fulfilment of the two suppressed
wishes for deflowering a girl and for material comfort. But now
that I have given such a complete account of the motives that led
to my producing the dandelion phantasy, I cannot help concluding
that what I am dealing with is something that never happened at all
but has been unjustifiably smuggled in among my childhood
memories.’

  
¹
[‘Some day, perhaps, it will be a joy
to remember even these things.’]

Screen Memories

499

   I see that I must take up the
defence of its genuineness. You are going too far. You have
accepted my assertion that every suppressed phantasy of this kind
tends to slip away into a childhood scene. But suppose now that
this cannot occur unless there is a memory-trace the content of
which offers the phantasy a point of contact - comes, as it were,
half way to meet it. Once a point of contact of this kind has been
found - in the present instance it was the deflowering, the taking
away of the flowers - the remaining content of the phantasy is
remodelled with the help of every legitimate intermediate idea -
take the bread as an example - till it can find further points of
contact with the content of the childhood scene. It is very
possible that in the course of this process the childhood scene
itself also undergoes changes; I regard it as certain that
falsifications of memory may be brought about in this way too. In
your case the childhood scene seems only to have had some of its
lines engraved more deeply: think of the over-emphasis on the
yellow and the exaggerated niceness of the bread. But the raw
material was utilizable. If that had not been so, it would not have
been possible for this particular memory, rather than any others,
to make its way forward into consciousness. No such scene would
have occurred to you as a childhood memory, or perhaps some other
one would have - for you know how easily our ingenuity can build
connecting bridges from any one point to any other. And apart from
your own subjective feeling which I am not inclined to
under-estimate, there is another thing that speaks in favour of the
genuineness of your dandelion memory. It contains elements which
have not been solved by what you have told me and which do not in
fact fit in with the sense required by the phantasy. For instance,
your boy cousin helping you to rob the little girl of her flowers -
can you make any sense of the idea of being helped in deflowering
someone? or of the peasant woman and the nurse in front of the
cottage?

Screen Memories

500

   ‘Not that I can
see.’

   So the phantasy does not coincide
completely with the childhood scene. It is only based on it at
certain points. That argues in favour of the childhood memory being
genuine.

   ‘Do you think an
interpretation like this of an apparently innocent childhood memory
is often applicable?’

   Very often, in my experience.
Shall we amuse ourselves by seeing whether the two examples given
by the Henris can be interpreted as screen memories concealing
subsequent experiences and wishes? I mean the memory of a table
laid for a meal with a basin of ice on it, which was supposed to
have some connection with the death of the subject’s
grandmother, and the other memory, of a child breaking off a branch
from a tree while he was on a walk and of his being helped to do it
by someone.

   He reflected for a little and
then answered: ‘I can make nothing of the first one. It is
most probably a case of displacement at work; but the intermediate
steps are beyond guessing. As for the second case, I should be
prepared to give an interpretation, if only the person concerned
had not been a Frenchman.’

   I cannot follow you there. What
difference would that make?

   ‘A great deal of
difference, since what provides the intermediate step between a
screen memory and what it conceals is likely to be a verbal
expression. In German "to pull one out" is a very common
vulgar term for masturbation. The scene would then be putting back
into early childhood a seduction to masturbation - someone was
helping him to do it - which in fact occurred at a later period.
But even so, it does not fit, for in the childhood scene there were
a number of other people present.’

   Whereas his seduction to
masturbate must have occurred in solitude and secrecy. It is just
that contrast that inclines me to accept your view: it serves once
again to make the scene innocent. Do you know what it means when in
a dream we see ‘a lot of strangers’, as happens so
often in dreams of nakedness in which we feel so terribly
embarrassed? Nothing more nor less than secrecy, which there again
is expressed by its opposite. However, our interpretation remains a
jest, since we have no idea whether a Frenchman would recognize an
allusion to masturbation in the words
casser une branche
d’un arbre
or in some suitably emended phrase.

Screen Memories

501

   This analysis, which I have
reproduced as accurately as possible, will, I hope, have to some
extent clarified the concept of a ‘screen memory’ as
one which owes its value as a memory not to its own content but to
the relation existing between that content and some other, that has
been suppressed. Different classes of screen memories can be
distinguished according to the nature of that relation. We have
found examples of two of these classes among what are described as
the earliest memories of childhood - that is, if we include under
the heading of screen memories the incomplete childhood scenes
which are innocent by very reason of their incompleteness. It is to
be anticipated that screen memories will also be formed from
residues of memories relating to later life as well. Anyone who
bears in mind their distinctive feature - namely that they are
extremely well remembered but that their content is completely
indifferent - will easily recall a number of examples of the sort
from his own memory. Some of these screen memories dealing with
events later in life owe their importance to a connection with
experiences in early youth which have remained suppressed. The
connection, that is, is the reverse of the one in the case which I
have analysed, where a childhood memory was accounted for by later
experiences. A screen memory may be described as
‘retrogressive’ or as having ‘pushed
forward’ according as the one chronological relation or the
other holds between the screen and the thing screened-off. From
another point of view, we can distinguish positive screen memories
from negative ones (or refractory memories) whose content stands in
a contrary relation to the suppressed material. The whole subject
deserves a more thorough examination; but I must content myself
with pointing out what complicated processes - processes,
incidentally, which are altogether analogous to the formation of
hysterical symptoms - are involved in the building up of our store
of memories.