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The problem of screen memories is an old one, largely treated in the past from an economic and dynamic point of view. Freud (7) first touched on these considerations when he wrote of "some people whose earliest recollections of childhood are concerned with everyday and indifferent events … recollected (too clearly, one is inclined to say) in every detail. …" In the same paper Freud explains: "It is a case of displacement on to something associated by contiguity; or, looking at the process as a whole, a case of repression accompanied by replacement by something in the neighbourhood (whether in space or time)."
In the first quotation above I would emphasize both too and clearly, an emphasis which Freud already sensed as a problem in itself. Something recollected "too clearly" he later described as the "vividness" of the screen, for example, in his attempts to recall the name of the artist, Signorelli (8):
… as long as the name of the painter remained inaccessible to me, I had more than a clear visual memory of the cycle of his frescoes, and of the picture of himself in the corner; at least it was more intensive than any of my other visual memory traces. In another case, also reported in my essay of 1898, I had hopelessly forgotten the street name and address connected with a disagreeable visit in a strange city, but—as if to mock me—the house number appeared especially vivid,