screen memory (Deckerinnerung) A childhood memory that is paradoxically vivid and inconsequential. Because of the apparent banality of these memories there does not seem to be any reason for them to be preserved in the memory, a fact that psychoanalysis latches on to as an important clue to their deeper importance. Freud, Sigmund theorized that such memories are compromise formations, or symptoms, like parapraxis, meaning they function to disguise or conceal a trauma of some kind, usually of a sexual nature.