Memories Are Made of This

By Kevin Murphy M.Sc.,
Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist
Dublin, Ireland

Much of the work of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy involves memory. Not that a person is forced to search out and reveal any particular memory from their past but invariably it goes that way naturally. The work of unravelling the meaning behind puzzling current symptoms inevitably leads back to earlier times in their life. And here we come to an interesting phenomenon.
Often you find that someone will have a memory they go back to again and again, a particular scene or a particular moment in their life on which they instinctively place a great deal of significance.
It might be a memory that comprises a harmless, bland scene that was somehow frightening for them; or it might be a scene with no obvious impact and yet continues to puzzle them for its insistence in their mind; or it might be a time when a change happened in their lives, a new school, a new home, after which, for no apparent reason, they believe that things were never the same for them.
It is as if the memory has an almost magnetic hold on them and yet they cannot figure out what it is. They believe it must be something important but just what is it?
In psychoanalytic theory, which has evolved and continues to evolve over the past 150years, there is a little known thing called screen memories. These are memories that cover up whatever is unacceptable to the conscious ego and so are defensive in nature.
The first mention of this was, as you would expect, from Freud in 1899, the year before his major work The Interpretation of Dreams was published. "Screen Memories" is a paper in which Freud evoked one of his own memories of childhood (though he ascribed it to someone else), in which he saw himself playing with other children in a very green meadow across which vivid yellow flowers were sprinkled.
Analysis led to a later memory, from adolescence, in which he was in love with a girl in a yellow dress. Thus the childhood memory was in this case screening off a later sexual wish: there was no childhood memory, but only a phantasy put back into childhood. The notion of screen memories, as he outlined it, was that they were false constructions, not intentionally so but with a particular purpose in mind.
This memory from the past therefore has a hold on us and yet appears devoid of any real meaning. This has often been used as the basis to undermine the accuracy or trustworthiness of childhood memories. But a child who has genuinely been abused is not constructing something that did not happen. There is a very real reason why the memory of that abuse will not go away as it contains all the meaning one needs to explain it, albeit meaning riddled with trauma, self contempt, and exploitation.
Screen memories, in contrast, have no meaning within themselves and are devoid of trauma. They are quite literally a screen. The desires that the memory encodes are displaced, temporally (from the near past to the distant past) as well as psychically (from one object to another).
And they introduced for the first time in the great man’s thinking the notion of phantasy. The importance of phantasy for Freud was that it replaced his earlier notion that neurosis had to be caused by trauma of some kind. Now it could be caused by ‘ideas’ a child employed, rightly or wrongly, to interpret experience.
Thinking since Freud has broadened out to include the possibility that screen memories have a screening effect on issues that were current at the time of the memory itself. In other words they have an iconic quality, drawing their power from events, relationships, and ideas both imaginary and real, that were happening at that same time in the child’s life. That is why some clients refer to these memories as puzzling. There is nothing in them, in themselves, that can give any clue as to why they are so enigmatically present in their memory. And yet through teasing out the ideas contained within them and exploring the other factors present in their life at that time, a new and more understandable perspective can be achieved. In short, they exist because something either then or much later was being defended against. They are not so much childhood memories as memories about childhood that come with an astonishing degree of clarity and paradoxically insignificant content. They are little like dreams, in that sense, with their meaning disguised and displaced onto less important details.

* The next blog will appear on Friday July 10th, 2009.