Brain Pain discussion

This discussion covers Screen Memories, p. 1 – 22


Freud explores the nature of certain early childhood memories that seem to be too banal or unimportant to have lasted into adulthood and what purpose these memories may serve.

"Before dealing with the psychological problems attaching to the earliest memories of childhood, it would of course be essential to make a collection of material by circularizing a fairly large number of normal adults and discovering what kind of recollections they are able to produce from these early years."

Well, hey, it's probably an interesting exercise to give a few samples of our own earliest memories, don't you think? And perhaps not too irrelevant to the topic of the reading?

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The earliest memories I can recall now are from when I was around three years old, and they are only very tiny snippets.

One is of walking through a hallway with my parents and my maternal grandfather, and I was trying to help lift and carry a light-blue suitcase which was far too big for me to carry for more than a few steps... not very heavy for its contents, but awkwardly large. It was one of those older-style suitcases with flat, rigid sides.

The second is of drinking from a water fountain. The fountain was a kind of stone basin, with a spout near the center, and the water arched up and dropped down into the basin. I was in a park, there was some greenery, it was hot and sunny.

In retrospect, I've managed to place these memories in a context, but with time I've wondered how the process of remembering may have produced or altered the memories to the point that I only partially trust them.

I now believe that the suitcase memory was from moving out of my family's first apartment in LeFrak City, Queens, and we were going towards the elevator, carrying out some clothes. (I don't remember anything at all about the apartment itself or anything that happened there.)

The water fountain, I now believe to have been in Central Park in Manhattan, because my parents later told me of a few trips we took into Manhattan when I was around that age, and at a later age I may have seen the fountain again. However, we also went often to Flushing Meadows park, which was the old World's Fair grounds. I don't know if they ever had such fountains there.

The memories themselves are devoid of any dramatic or emotional content, so they seem odd memories to retain. One reason I tend to doubt the details of the memories is that they could have been modified later by my other experiences of drinking from water fountains, and of seeing and playing with the blue suitcase in other locations later in life, so that I can imagine them more vividly, but not perhaps so accurately with respect to the original impressions.

Now, regarding "Screen Memories," I find myself largely in sympathy with Freud's ideas, even though like most of Freud's work, his ideas are asserted rather than demonstrated or proven in any sense. Also, if the translator's claim that Freud's dialog about the dandelions memory is actually a disguised autobiographical recollection... well, then this text is almost a meta-commentary on itself, as Freud treats memories, dreams, and now his own research as something that can be revised and fictionalized to suit one's purposes!

Okay, anyway, in my own memories, I find I'm similar to this person whose strongest childhood memory is of the bowl of ice: remembering something of no apparent real significance, while not remembering events that should be considered important. (For example, in later life my parents, particularly my mom, have told me that when I was around five or six, I dangled my infant brother out the window of the apartment that was our second home! I'm so far from remembering any such event that I'm tempted to deny it ever happened. But if it did... how odd that I could be incapable of remembering that, but I would remember a three-year-old's impression of a drinking fountain.)

I'm in accord with Freud's idea that memories are vague, not trustworthy, and subject to later modification, revision, falsification... but also that we can select from our genuine memories, those moments which most closely correspond to what we desire to believe.

I've had my own meditations on dreams, and I've often thought that the most vividly remembered dreams are actually constructs of our waking minds... in the act of "remembering" our dreams, we are revising them, rationalizing them, making them concrete... in fact, we're practically dreaming them. What actually occurred in our minds while we were sleeping is inaccessible, unknowable.

Here, Freud treats childhood memories as a phenomenon very similar to dreams (which he regarded as a construct made up of other remembered trivial elements of the recent past before sleeping... another assertion that many have been persuaded by though it has never been given any clear proof or demonstration.)

But okay, moving on. I'm fond of this little quote from the article: "It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused."

But why limit this to childhood memories. As I'm growing older, my later childhood memories and teenage memories, which I've possessed, and recalled, and retold, are also starting to seem more doubtful to me, and I'm wondering how much my act of recalling has cast them into the role of stories, thus at least partially fictionalized. And soon I may start doubting even more recent memories. Meanwhile, we tend to think of memories as more valid if we can confirm them by asking others who also remember... but then two people often remember events in rather different ways... and when their memories, on the other hand, do correspond, shouldn't we wonder to what extend they result from a compromise? A kind of communal memory that's really folktale creation?

Hmmm...

Zadignose wrote: "when I was around five or six, I dangled my infant brother out the window of the apartment that was our second home!..."

Now we know where Michael Jackson got the idea....


An interesting element that Freud pointed out is that in memories where the patient can see themselves in the scene, rather than from the POV of the child, that this is a possible indication of a screen memory. In my own early memories, I am always looking through my own eyes, with the POV I would have had. My earliest memory I can date for certain is from 18 months old when I was in the hospital to have my tonsils removed. A second clear memory is the night that JFK was shot. My parents were in front of the TV, the lights were out, and the room was filled with the blue-grey light of a late-50's television. I was two-years old, and so had no idea what was going on, or why my mother was sobbing uncontrollably. But again, the scene is from what would have been my actual POV. I have a handful of clear memories from the same time period, and all of them are from my own POV, so I'm assuming that the events occurred, and that they probably occurred in a way similar to the memory. I don't have any early memories where I can see myself. Not that POV is the only indicator for a screen memory.

As for Freud's ideas, he was certainly blazing a new trail with all of his work. He had no machines that go "Bing!" to look at the brain and its electrical activity. I chose this book because in his way, Freud was a kind of literary writer, taking his observations and their limitations, and creating new ideas and theories from this raw material. If and when you read the last four books for this year (Calvino, et al), it will be interesting to think about their fiction in terms of some of Freud's musings about creativity and memory.

I've been reading a few neuro books, so one of the first things I did when reading Screen Memories was try to determine what mechanisms could be responsible for the phenomenon Freud describes.

In regards to the selectivity of which memories are retained, and how they can be modified ("degraded"), there is the process of memory reconsolidation. The key mechanism here is that the memory is retrieved (read) into, say, consciousness -- and then it is written back. The "writing back" is the problem, because it can cause the memory to change, or the write may fail (memory loss). It is believed that the write-back mechanism is intended to create or strengthen associations with other memories, so it looks like Freud nailed that one. This model of memory reconsolidation applies only to episodic memory, i.e. things like childhood experiences, as opposed to factual knowledge or task-based memory.

The other interesting bit is the notion of "screen memories" themselves. Freud seems to be using this to describe a memory that is recalled in place of another memory. What this calls to mind is the mechanism which prevents you from remembering something on the tip of your tongue. It goes something like this: you remember a synonym or homophone for a particular word, but you cannot recall the actual word if you are actively trying to do so. After a few minutes, the target word is easily remembered. This is thought to be due to the long refractory period of memory cells: a near-miss shuts down the entire area for something like 4-7 minutes. Now, this would actually make an excellent defense mechanism along the lines of what Freud is describing: a more strongly-connected (because it is more frequently-accessed) memory would fire before a traumatic memory, and shut down the entire region so that the traumatic memory does not activate.

Back to Screen Memories proper, I found the bit about having a third-person POV in your childhood memories to be quite interesting. I distinctly recall this being a feature of my childhood dreams, and it seems to have introduced itself into some childhood memories as well. I thought the mind might have been filling in the blanks from old photos and the like, but that wouldn't have been as prevalent in Freud's day. Maybe as memories age and are accessed infrequently, they are compacted to a notional form ("this happened when X and Y were present, with yellow flowers"), and the actual imagery is recreated with what the mind currently has access to?

Mkfs wrote: "Maybe as memories age and are accessed infrequently, they are compacted to a notional form ("this happened when X and Y were present, with yellow flowers"), and the actual imagery is recreated with what the mind currently has access to? ..."

This sounds possible. As an adult, we've seen photos of ourselves as children, and so can edit ourselves as children into a third-person POV scenario.

Zadignose wrote: ""Before dealing with the psychological problems attaching to the earliest memories of childhood, it would of course be essential to make a collection of material by circularizing a fairly large num..."

One of the most satisfying aspects of reading anything of Freud's is that you can test it against your own experience. In regard to screen memories do I have bland memories that screen potent experiences? I think my earliest memory is of my family dog Skippy eating shit that had fallen out of my diaper on the stairs of my grandfather's house. I'm not sure how old I was, but I was climbing/crawling the stairs, so let's say between one and two. This memory occurs to me fairly frequently and has throughout my life. According to the screen memories text this shouldn't be the relevant experience, that it should mask the objectionable one, but there's such a rawness to it that it seems indelible without attachment.

Mkfs wrote: "I've been reading a few neuro books, so one of the first things I did when reading Screen Memories was try to determine what mechanisms could be responsible for the phenomenon Freud describes.

In ..."
Does the memory reconciliation process operate each time an episodic memory is brought into consciousness? That is, if the memory is written back with changes, when that memory is again retrieved into consciousness, is it the revised memory itself that will now undergo reconciliation? Does the original experience influence subsequent reconciliations? Or is it like a palimpsest: the old memory is erased to accommodate the new?

Alex wrote: "Does the memory reconciliation process operate each time an episodic memory is brought into consciousness?"

It happens every time - the very act of recalling a memory has the potential to alter it. This is one of the things that makes eye-witnesses so unreliable: by the time the police get through asking them a few hundred times what they saw, there's often very little of the original memory left.

So under reconsolidation, the original memory is erased and replaced with the recalled memory. There may have been a study where traumatic memories were erased or degraded with such techniques, I cannot fully recall (go figure).