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In chapter 4, (‘Childhood memories and screen memories’) of The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud attempted to reconstruct an episode he experienced more than four decades beforehand:
I saw myself standing in front of a cupboard [‘Kasten’] 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 [‘Schrank’] — why I was crying, and what the arrival of my mother had to do with it — all this was obscure to me … 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
Page 151anxiety or longing. But how did the child get the idea of looking for his absent mother in the cupboard? (1901, p. 50)
Freud's initial answer to the question posed by him in the quoted passage centred upon the disappearance of his nurse who — as he came to understand — ‘had carried out considerable thefts during my mother's confinement and had been taken to court on a charge preferred by my half-brother’ (p. 51). According to this interpretation:
… the reason why I had turned in particular to this brother, and had asked him where she was, was probably because I 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” [“eingekastelt”].’ At th