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.
Development
1895
Sigmund Freud introduced by
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.
1918
Sigmund Freud developed by
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.
1967
Jean Laplanche developed by
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.
1967
Jean-Bertrand Pontalis developed by
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.
Relations
- 1895 introduced by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1918 developed by Sigmund Freud
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.
- 1967 developed by Jean Laplanche
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.
- 1967 developed by Jean-Bertrand Pontalis
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.
Works
- 1918
From the History of an Infantile Neurosis
Freud's case history of the patient known as the "Wolf Man", a young Russian aristocrat. Rather than recounting the adult illness and its treatment as a whole, Freud concentrates on the infantile neurosis that lay behind it. The centre of the account is a childhood dream of white wolves sitting in a tree, which Freud traces back to the child's sight of parental intercourse, the primal scene, at the age of one and a half; the scene, he argues, acquired its meaning and its traumatic force only later, by deferred action. The case also examines the boy's animal phobia, his religious obsessions, his anal erotism and his castration anxiety, and reports Freud's decision to set a time limit to the treatment. Written in 1914 and published in 1918, it serves at the same time as a defence of infantile sexuality against the revisions of Jung and Adler.
- 1967
The Language of Psycho-Analysis
A dictionary of the concepts of psychoanalysis by Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, prepared over eight years at Daniel Lagache's instigation and published by the Presses universitaires de France in 1967, in Lagache's Bibliothèque de psychanalyse. Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, appeared from the Hogarth Press in 1973. Freud kept revising his theory and never fixed it in a final system, so instead of bare definitions each entry traces how a concept arose and changed in his writings, supports the account with the relevant passages, and sets out its difficulties. The alphabetical entries run from abreaction to working-through and also take in terms of later analysts, such as the mirror stage and the transitional object. Some entries brought neglected Freudian notions back into use, notably après-coup (afterwardsness) and Anlehnung, rendered as étayage (leaning-on). The book has been translated into more than twenty languages and become a standard reference.
See also
References
- The Language of Psycho-Analysis1967 Evidence for a relation
- From the History of an Infantile Neurosis1918 Evidence for a relation