Concept
Afterwardsness
Freud's notion that experiences, impressions and memory traces are reworked at a later time, when new experience or a new stage of development gives them a meaning and a pathogenic force they did not have at first. Laplanche and Pontalis made it a central term of Freudian thought, and Laplanche proposed the English 'afterwardsness' in place of the Standard Edition's 'deferred action'. He read it as joining two directions in time: a message from the other deposited first, and the subject's later retranslation of it.
Read more- Introduced by
- Sigmund Freud
- Key works
- 2
introduced by
- Sigmund Freud 1895 Freud used nachträglich and Nachträglichkeit from the 1890s, most fully in the 1895 Project for a Scientific Psychology, where a memory becomes a trauma only after the event, and in letters to Fliess. Laplanche and Pontalis later gathered these uses into one concept.
developed by
- Sigmund Freud 1918 The Wolf Man case is Freud's fullest published working of Nachträglichkeit: the scene observed at one and a half acquires its meaning and its traumatic force only when it is revived, in the dream at the age of four, by a sexual understanding the child did not have before.
- Jean Laplanche 1967 The Vocabulaire's entry ‘Après-coup’ drew Freud's scattered uses of nachträglich into a single concept and made it central to Freudian thought. Laplanche later proposed the English ‘afterwardsness’ in place of ‘deferred action’ and read the term in the light of the general theory of seduction.
- Jean-Bertrand Pontalis 1967 As co-author of the Vocabulaire, Pontalis shares in its entry ‘Après-coup’, which first presented Freud's Nachträglichkeit as a concept in its own right.