Lounging with a Big Mac in One Hand and Freud by My Side Harvey: On Roy Greenberg, Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch

Abstract

Although this is not explicitly stated, the title of Harvey Roy Greenberg's Screen Memories: Hollywood Cinema on the Psychoanalytic Couch, is obviously a reference to Freud's essay 'Screen Memories' written in 1899. Freud uses the term 'screen memory' to refer to memory's distorting operations, whereby an early memory is used as a screen for a later event. In his book on film and psychoanalytic criticism, however, Greenberg inverts this thesis to refer to a more general (or popularly) conceived notion of the screen memory -whereby an early event is screened by later memories. Greenberg's utilisation of this trope of the 'screen memory' is that which links together the several essays in this collection (some of which have previously been published in psychiatric journals such as the Psychoanalytic Review and Psychiatric Times). A particular event which Greenberg is concerned with the screening of is the Holocaust as represented in post-World War II films. By ending his book with a discussion of Paul Mazursky's Enemies: A Love Story (1990), a film about concentration camp survivors, there is the invocation, by Greenberg, for film makers and viewers to screen (and not to screen) this huge historical event.