ABSTRACT

Screen memories, the durable fragments of childhood memory that accompany us through the life-cycle, were felt to be of great significance by S. Freud and the early analysts. A fresh look at screen memories shows that they can be seen as reflections of a private, one-person mode of thinking: one where the individual remembers and imagines on his own and the act of remembering is of equal importance with the content of the memory. Freud first took note of the group of childhood memories that he would call “screen memories” early in his career, at a time when he was centrally concerned with the processes of remembering and forgetting. By contrast, the narrower group of screen memories from childhood described by Freud had by the 1960s gradually ceased to be a significant subject in analytic writing; the term “screen memory” was not included in B. Moore and B. Fine’s 1968 Glossary of PsychoanalyticTerms and Concepts.