ABSTRACT
S. Freud’s self-analysis of his childhood memories indicated that details associated with an adolescent erotic passion were “translated back” into an innocuous early childhood memory of yellow flowers and tasty bread, leading him to the generalisation that this process of retention and disguise is governed by semiotic rules of transformation. Freud’s title for his paper is “Uber Deckerinnerungen”, which Strachey translates as “Screen memories”. At the start Freud tells us that in his clinical work he has to deal with his patients' “fragmentary recollections” from childhood, broken bits of memories. Freud repeats the word psychische as if struggling to persuade the reader of its meaning by sheer repetition. Freud is telling us that there is no staging of an impulse without unconscious stage directions. Among the complex issues requiring further examination, we note that Freud makes recurrent mention of how “indifferent events” are “recollected in every detail”.
