Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association 1, 1953, No. 3: Norman Reider. 'Reconstruction and Screen Function.'

Freud has shown that when certain patients are presented with a reconstruction they respond with recollections which although not concerned with the actual subject of the reconstruction are nevertheless related to it. These recollections are usually details which are vividly remembered. Freud suggested that the upward drive of the repressed, stirred into activity by the reconstruction, tries to carry the memories into consciousness. A resistance has obstructed this movement with a resultant displacement onto objects of minor significance.

A case is described presenting the reactions of a patient who was offered a reconstruction. This took the form of the idea that about the age of three or four the patient, while being held by his mother, soiled himself, symbolically offering his faeces as a gift to his father. The father left the room in disgust. The patient responded to the reconstruction with scepticism, but went on to relate how embarrassed he might have felt (embarrassment was an outstanding emotional reaction of the patient). He added a memory, often previously related in the analysis, of how he had bought a gift for a friend's small daughter not knowing that it was her birthday. When his friend told him this he was extremely embarrassed. He lied not admitting his ignorance of the child's birthday. In his recollection of this after the reconstruction he revealed that he had bought the gift not so much for the child as to please the father. The bridge between the original experience in early childhood and the screen experience was the intense affect of embarrassment.

Recollections which are provoked by reconstructions indicate displacements onto 'adjacent objects' and are screens. In this case the reconstruction constituted a demand which made the patient attempt to break through the repression. This led to immediate aggravation of the symptoms and to the tendency to use a screening process.