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Dear Editors,
In the subtext of a lucid paper on psychic trauma and the narrativization of the analysand's past and present experience through the exploration of the transference- countertransference, Lawrence J. Brown (2006) indirectly gives evidence of an important phenomenon involving screen memory and screen trauma that is particularly relevant to our understanding of early traumatic memories and their possible evolution over the course of psychoanalysis. The case report points toward (but does not explicitly identify) the fading of screen memories during a properly conducted analysis. The lessening or lifting of screens has clinical and scientific implications for psychoanalysis, especially regarding the controversial current status of the seduction hypothesis (Good, 2006). Illustrations of the vicissitudes of screens, however, are not so well documented in the analytic literature.
Brown notes that, ‘The analyst's [containing and transforming reveries] … assist the birth in the patient of increasingly sophisticated ways of giving meaning to the traumatic episodes in her life’ such that, in successful treatments, ‘the patient's capacity to represent the trauma evolves from the concrete to the progressively more abstract, culminating in the historicization of the previously unthinkable [and unsymbolized] experiences’ (p. 1582). His sensitive, careful, and self-reflective approach with the patient helped her accomplish this creative and therapeutic task. Yet it does not always work out that way. Instead, as the patient's initially reported history of sexual abuse suggests, the ‘β-screen’ may predispose to screen memory and screen trauma, and these at times lead analyst and patient astray (Good, 1994, 1998). Screening can seductively divert the psychoanalytic endeavor away from what is happening in the immediacy of the transference-countertransference and thereby constitute a defensive enactment, particularly when a particular reconstructive screen involving trauma i