ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to argue in favour of the Freudian tradition of close listening to the dynamic unconscious, which S. Freud exemplifies in part in his “Screen memories” paper, in his attempt to reach the deeper sense of apparently trivial memories. The fact that some points in the memory evoke no associations in the “patient” simply means that they are irrelevant to the memory’s function as a screen. Thus, whereas in his “Screen memories” article Freud’s associations and interpretations focus on his unconscious adolescent wishful fantasies regarding these two most powerful motives, the analysis of his dream focuses on his earliest experiences of these motives, at his mother’s breast. Although Freud’s nurse is only once explicitly mentioned in the article, and his mother not at all, the authors proposes that his nurse, and mother, nonetheless play a major role in Freud’s latent thoughts in the paper.
