Screen Memories and Screening Functions: Recollection, Personal Histories, and Post-Traumatic Dreams

Beginning with a brief examination of the early history of psychoanalysis, this essay highlights the centrality of the notion of screen memory to the progression of psychoanalytic thought as it moved through its earliest period, the stage ending with the completion of The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). “Screen Memories,” published in 1899, questioned the presumption that the recovery of a memory of childhood trauma formed the bedrock of psychoanalytic work centering on pathological ideas and thus the essay definitively concluded the period of complete reliance on the theory of pathological ideas as they related to childhood trauma. In the wake of “Screen Memories,” psychoanalysis moved to an exploration of inner psychological nature as it contributes to conflict and the examination of conflicted memory as the latent content in symptoms and in the repressed wishes of dreams.

Deploying the method of the association of ideas to move from manifest to latent mental content, early psychoanalytic theory approached the irrational, perplexing, and overtly symptomatic idea—the obsession, compulsion, conversion, delusion, or phobia—as the manifest content and the memory of childhood trauma as the latent material. Through association the symptomatic idea could be analyzed, and “psychoanalyze” at this time was employed as a transitive verb: one analyzed something—the symptomatic idea—for the purpose of getting to its latent content, presumed to be a memory of a childhood trauma. The notion of memory composed part of this larger