A woman recalls a childhood memory of being comforted by her mother after a fall, but careful, gradual exploration later establishes that while the fall genuinely happened, it was in fact her father, not her mother, who was present and whose role in the memory has been substituted, apparently protecting her from a more painful truth about that day. What is this kind of memory called?

This is a screen memory: a memory containing both accurate and inaccurate elements blended together, where a real event genuinely underlies it but a specific detail has been substituted, typically for something more painful than the version actually recalled. It is not a false memory, since a real event — the fall — genuinely occurred, rather than the whole event being fabricated. It is not retrospective falsification, which involves a general mood-driven colouring of memory rather than a specific substituted detail protecting against a particular painful truth. And it is not confabulation, which fills a gap caused by organic memory impairment, not something suggested by this account.