The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 24, 1955, No. 2: Phyllis Greenacre. '"It's My Own Invention": A Special Screen Memory of Mr. Lewis Carroll, Its Form and History.'

The screen memory concerned is the White Knight's—described in his poem

This is a screen memory within a screen memory (Alice's memory of the White Knight) within a dream, since the whole of Through the Looking Glass is a dream. According to Freud the inclusion of an incident in a dream within a dream is the most complete affirmation of the reality of that incident. Greenacre argues the same of a screen memory within a screen memory. The repetitive serial enclosure so characteristic of Carroll's work is the index of the force of the denied experiences. These are indicated by the form itself, which symbolizes the successive pregnancies undergone by his mother. Similar anxieties are also revealed by his preoccupation with changes in body size—they concern both pregnancy and the tumescence and detumescence of an excited father-figure in the primal scene with its influence upon him. The fixation on the girl child at the age of eight—the least sexual form of childhood, being a fused and castrated version of both sexes—served as the most efficient defence against the anxieties of the changing body forms, whether of the phallic boy or of the phallic (pregnant) mother.