Screen Memories Summary and Analysis

The essay "Screen Memories" begins with a discussion of childhood memories. For Freud, the childhood is the essential, formative period in the development of the adult psyche. Freud claims, though, that the childhood memory and psyche are very different from the adult memory. It is not until the child is around six that their memories form a narrative pattern that is temporally connected. Because of this, Freud suggests that many of the childhood memories we recall as adults are not memories, but are in fact not memories at all. They are rather constructions of our unconscious. Our unconscious mind operates on different kinds of associations and analogies. A scene may be important because of its, seemingly, abstract association with some other important aspect of one's psychology, not because there is any direct connection between the scene and an important...