ABSTRACT
The clinical interest in screen memories has dropped out of the mainstream of analytic discussion—and with it close study of S. Freud’s original paper—the authors believe that there is much to be gained from revisiting and re-examining both the phenomenon and the paper within a contemporary context. Screen memories, Freud explained, were defensively distorted referents of early events, many of them traumatic, in which the principal mechanisms of disguise were condensation and displacement. Freud, analysts saw screen memories as keys that would unlock aspects of the unique, subjective psychic in which analytic patients lived. In a paper on reconstruction, Gail S. Reed pointed out that Greenacre had argued against treating screen memories as though they were dreams or symptoms and that she had also noted the ineffectiveness of asking for associations to them. There is a specific rationale for not asking directly for associations to screen memories in the way one would do for dreams, parapraxes, or symptoms.
