Bruno told them that this memory could be considered a screen memory, in the Freudian sense—a recollection that functioned to cover his own trauma, to obscure it behind a different incident, one that was less significant. The enemy helmet and the aftermath of its discovery was always with him. In contrast, the more extreme consequences of the war on Bruno’s life, and what, exactly, he had understood of those consequences as a seven-year-old, had remained vague, something he was blocked from recollecting in any detail. Even as we do not choose a diversion from pain in the form of a screen
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