ABSTRACT
In Sigmund Freud’s writing about “screen memory,” memory and the mother are intimately associated from the start. In The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, Freud devoted a chapter to the topic of “Childhood Memories and Screen Memories,” which he later substantially revised to include some of his own memories. In his correspondence with Fliess, which provides a running commentary on the self-analysis carried on with particular intensity between May and mid-October 1897, Freud specifies that the element responsible for repression “is always what is feminine.” Freud’s overdetermined anecdote turns out to be an exemplary “mnemonic” for the child’s passage through the Oedipus and castration complexes. Freud’s original sequence of dream memories in the letters to Fliess offers another angle on the emergence of his theoretical concerns. During their correspondence, Freud frequently invokes Fliess’s notion of male periodicity, especially in the context of his own “periodic” creativity and stagnation as a psychoanalytic theorist.
