Afterwardness

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[[First appeared::Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895)]]



Afterwardness (German: Nachträglichkeit; French: après-coup), often translated in the Standard Edition as "deferred action," is a fundamental concept in psychoanalysis describing the specific temporality of psychic causality. It refers to the process by which early experiences, impressions, and memory traces are revised, reinterpreted, and reworked at a later date to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of development.[1]

The concept challenges linear models of time and determinism. In the theory of afterwardness, the past is not a static archive that determines the present; rather, the past is constituted and imbued with meaning—often traumatic or pathogenic meaning—only through the retroactive influence of subsequent events, such as the onset of puberty or the intervention of the symbolic order.

Afterwardness

Afterwardness (German: Nachträglichkeit; French: après-coup) is a foundational psychoanalytic concept designating the retroactive attribution of meaning and traumatic significance to earlier experiences. Rather than assuming linear causality—where events are traumatic at the moment they occur—afterwardness posits a temporal paradox: experiences become psychically significant only belatedly, when reinterpreted through later events, symbolic frameworks, or developmental stages.[2]

Introduced by Sigmund Freud in his early writings on hysteria and trauma, afterwardness challenges commonsense notions of memory, causality, and psychic time. Jacques Lacan later radicalized the concept within structural linguistics, arguing that retroaction (rétroaction) structures not only trauma but all signification and subject formation. Jean Laplanche positioned Nachträglichkeit as the cornerstone of his "general theory of seduction," emphasizing the delayed translation of enigmatic messages from caregivers.[3]

The concept remains central to contemporary psychoanalytic understandings of symptom formation, transference, and the non-archival nature of memory. It has influenced trauma theory, feminist theory, queer theory, and philosophical accounts of temporality and hermeneutics.

Etymology and Translation History

The German term Nachträglichkeit derives from nachträglich ("subsequent," "belated," "deferred"). Literally meaning "belatedness" or "subsequentness," the word carries connotations of something added or modified after the fact.[2]

Early English translations of Freud rendered Nachträglichkeit inconsistently—often as "deferred action," "retroactive," or "subsequent"—obscuring its technical specificity. James Strachey's Standard Edition employed varied translations without establishing a stable English equivalent, contributing to decades of conceptual ambiguity in Anglophone psychoanalysis.[2]

French psychoanalysis adopted après-coup ("after the event," "in retrospect"), which emphasizes retroaction while preserving temporal complexity. Laplanche and Pontalis's 1967 Vocabulaire de la psychanalyse established après-coup as the canonical French rendering, influencing Lacan's extensive use of the term in his Seminars.[2]

Contemporary English usage has increasingly settled on afterwardness to capture both temporal delay and the active reconstitution of meaning—distinguishing the concept from mere postponement or recollection. The term underscores that psychic causality operates retroactively, not simply later.

Freudian Origins

Early Formulations

Freud first articulated the logic of afterwardness in the 1890s, during his investigations of hysteria alongside Josef Breuer. In the Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Freud proposed a radical revision of trauma theory: certain childhood experiences—particularly those involving sexual excitation—might be registered without distress or conscious comprehension, becoming traumatic only later when subsequent events or psychosexual development confer new meaning upon them.[4]

This "two-moment" structure of trauma became explicit in Freud's correspondence with Wilhelm Fliess and in Studies on Hysteria (1895). Freud observed that hysterical symptoms arose not from single overwhelming events but from the retroactive linkage of an early experience (initially non-traumatic) with a later experience that activates and reinterprets it.[5]

In Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Freud extended this temporal logic to sexual development itself. Childhood sexuality is initially "polymorphously perverse"—experiences lack fixed meaning until puberty and the emergence of genital organization retroactively organize earlier impressions into a coherent sexual narrative.[6]

Case Illustrations

Freud's case histories exemplify afterwardness in clinical practice. In "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (the Wolf Man case, 1918), Freud analyzes how a primal scene—observed at eighteen months—acquired traumatic significance only years later, when the patient's maturing sexual understanding allowed him to retroactively comprehend parental intercourse as violent and castrating.[7] The original scene was not inherently traumatic; trauma emerged through Nachträglichkeit.

Similarly, Freud's seduction theory and its eventual revision hinged on afterwardness. Initially attributing neurosis to actual childhood seduction, Freud later recognized that many "seductions" were fantasies constructed retroactively—yet these fantasies were no less causally efficacious than real events. The psychic reality of trauma depends on deferred meaning-making, not on historical facticity.[5]

Theoretical Implications

Freud's concept of afterwardness revolutionized understandings of memory, repression, and symptom formation:

  • Memory as reconstruction: Memory is not archival retrieval but active reconfiguration. Past experiences are continually rewritten from the standpoint of present desire, conflict, and symbolic positions.[8]
  • Symptom temporality: Symptoms arise not from direct causation but through the belated linkage of disparate temporal moments. Overdetermination reflects this layered temporality.
  • Challenge to event-based trauma: Trauma is not reducible to a single catastrophic event. Instead, trauma emerges through a retroactive process whereby later experiences activate and resignify earlier ones—anticipating contemporary critiques of linear PTSD models.[7]

In The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud demonstrates that dream-work operates via retroaction: condensation and displacement reorganize memory traces according to present unconscious wishes, producing meanings that did not exist "originally."[9] Nachträglichkeit thus underpins Freud's entire metapsychology of unconscious temporality.

Lacanian Reformulation

Jacques Lacan transformed Nachträglichkeit from a trauma-specific mechanism into a structural principle governing all signification and subject formation. Where Freud emphasized retroactive meaning in pathology, Lacan argued that retroaction (rétroaction) constitutes the normal functioning of language and the unconscious itself.

Structural Linguistics Foundation

Drawing on Ferdinand de Saussure's structural linguistics, Lacan emphasized that signifiers possess no intrinsic meaning but acquire significance only through differential relations within a signifying chain. Meaning emerges retroactively—a signifier becomes intelligible only when subsequent signifiers provide context and closure.[10]

Lacan's concept of the point de capiton (quilting point or anchoring point) illustrates this temporal logic. Like an upholstery button that retroactively gathers and fixes fabric, certain master signifiers stabilize chains of meaning by après-coup—what seemed indeterminate becomes fixed retrospectively. Prior to this anchoring, signifiers float without settled significance; afterward, earlier elements appear as though they always possessed their current meaning, though that meaning is entirely a retroactive effect.[10]

The sentence itself exemplifies afterwardness: individual words remain ambiguous until the sentence concludes, at which point the final words retroactively determine the sense of what came before. Lacan insists this is not mere linguistic observation but the fundamental structure of symbolic causality: "retroaction" names how signifiers produce effects only belatedly.[11]

Subject Constitution

For Lacan, the subject is constituted through language—and therefore through afterwardness. The infant does not enter a pre-given symbolic universe; rather, entry into the symbolic order retroactively reorganizes earlier experiences, transforming biological events into symbolic meanings.[12]

Lacan distinguishes chronological time—the empirical sequence of events—from logical time—the structural moments through which meaning and subjectivity are produced. Afterwardness operates within logical time: the subject's past is not a fixed origin but is continually rewritten from the standpoint of present symbolic positions. "The unconscious is structured like a language," Lacan famously asserts, meaning the unconscious operates according to the retroactive temporality inherent in signification.[12]

This challenges developmental psychology's linear stage models. For Lacan, there is no "original" experience that simply unfolds consequences; instead, later symbolic inscriptions retroactively constitute what counts as "origin." The Oedipus complex, for example, is not lived in real time by the three-year-old but is constructed retroactively through subsequent symbolic elaborations.[13]

Registers: Real, Symbolic, Imaginary

Within Lacan's tripartite framework of the Real, Symbolic, and Imaginary, afterwardness functions primarily at the level of the Symbolic. The Imaginary—early identifications, mirror stage formations—provides raw material that only becomes meaningful through symbolic retroaction.

The Real—that which resists symbolization—initially appears as senseless trauma or overwhelming affect. Through après-coup, elements of the Real may become partially symbolized, entering psychic narrative and symptom formation. Crucially, this process does not eliminate the Real but mediates it through signifiers, producing new subjective meanings while maintaining a traumatic remainder.[12]

Trauma, in Lacanian theory, is thus not simply an external shock but a structural feature: an encounter with the Real that can only be approached retroactively through symbolic reconstruction. The analytic process itself creates conditions for après-coup—interpretations offered in analysis may retroactively reorganize past experiences, enabling the analysand to symbolize what previously remained unspoken.[12]

Laplanche's General Theory of Seduction

Jean Laplanche positioned Nachträglichkeit as the "copula of psychoanalysis"—the logical operator binding disparate temporal moments into psychic causality.[3] His general theory of seduction radicalizes both Freud's and Lacan's accounts by emphasizing the role of the adult Other in transmitting unconscious, untranslatable messages.

According to Laplanche, the infant is constitutively confronted with enigmatic messages (messages énigmatiques) from caregivers—communications saturated with the adult's unconscious sexuality. These messages are "enigmatic" because the child lacks the symbolic and psychosexual apparatus to decode them at the time of reception. They are registered but remain untranslatable, forming what Laplanche calls "source-objects" implanted within the psyche.[14]

Only later—during adolescence or adulthood, when sexual maturity and symbolic resources develop—does the subject attempt to translate these enigmatic deposits. This delayed translation (traduction) constitutes afterwardness: the earlier message acquires meaning only now, retroactively. Symptoms arise when translation encounters impasses, producing conflict between what was implanted and what can be symbolized.[14]

Laplanche's model underscores the temporal asymmetry of human sexuality: we receive sexual messages before we possess the means to understand them, and we spend psychic life attempting belated translations that can never fully succeed. This perpetual deferral structures desire, repression, and the formation of the unconscious itself.[3]

Clinical Implications

In psychoanalytic practice, afterwardness fundamentally shapes technique, interpretation, and understanding of therapeutic change.

Interpretation as Retroactive Intervention

Psychoanalysis does not aim to recover historical "facts" but to facilitate new symbolizations of past experiences. The analyst's interpretation functions as a retroactive intervention: by introducing a new signifier, the analyst may transform the meaning of earlier events for the analysand. The past is not changed as an empirical sequence, but its psychic significance is reconfigured.[12]

This distinguishes psychoanalytic interpretation from historical reconstruction. As Lacan emphasizes, analysis does not seek objective truth about what happened but subjective truth—how the past is lived and what it means for the subject's desire.[15]

Transference and Temporal Reconfiguration

Transference exemplifies afterwardness in clinical work. Transference does not simply "repeat" earlier relationships; rather, it reactivates earlier signifiers and resignifies them within the analytic situation. The analyst becomes the locus through which past signifiers acquire new meanings, demonstrating that psychic causality operates through retroaction rather than linear determination.[3]

Patients often report discovering new meanings in childhood memories during analysis—not because those meanings were hidden, but because the analytic process creates conditions for retroactive symbolization. What seemed trivial becomes significant; what seemed obvious reveals unexpected dimensions.[16]

Symptom Formation and Analytic Timing

Understanding symptoms through afterwardness clarifies why they emerge when they do—often years after the "causal" events. Symptoms are not direct effects but formations that crystallize through retroactive linkage of multiple temporal layers. A patient may develop anxiety in their thirties not because of a recent stressor but because present circumstances retroactively activate and reorganize unprocessed childhood material.[14]

Analytic timing thus becomes crucial. Premature interpretation may fail because the symbolic conditions for retroactive meaning-making are not yet in place. Conversely, well-timed interpretations can trigger après-coup effects, enabling sudden reorganizations of the analysand's relationship to their history.[15]

Afterwardness must be carefully distinguished from related psychoanalytic concepts with which it is sometimes conflated:

  • Repression: Repression designates a defensive operation excluding representations from consciousness, whereas afterwardness concerns the temporal constitution of meaning itself. An experience becomes repressed only once it has acquired specific signification—often retroactively. Repression thus presupposes afterwardness rather than explaining it.[2]
  • Repetition compulsion: Repetition refers to the return of the repressed in action, affect, or symptom. Afterwardness explains how what returns comes to be constituted as meaningful in the first place. Repetition enacts what afterwardness has structurally enabled.[17]
  • Screen memory: Screen memories are distorted recollections that conceal more significant experiences. Afterwardness does not concern distortion alone but the temporal logic through which any experience becomes psychically significant. A screen memory itself presupposes afterwardness—certain elements come to stand in for others through retroactive processes.[8]
  • Retrospective narration: Psychoanalysis does not claim subjects merely reinterpret their pasts arbitrarily. Rather, it insists that psychic causality operates retroactively at an unconscious level, structured by language and desire. The subject does not freely choose the meanings conferred on past experiences; these meanings emerge through the constraints of the symbolic order.[12]

Contemporary Relevance

Afterwardness has influenced diverse fields beyond clinical psychoanalysis:

  • Philosophy and hermeneutics: Paul Ricœur's work on narrative temporality resonates with afterwardness's emphasis on deferred meaning and the interpretive constitution of experience.[21]

Critical perspectives note potential limits: cognitive scientists question empirical verifiability, while political theorists emphasize the need to complement psychic temporality with attention to material and historical dimensions of trauma.[22]

Conclusion

Afterwardness remains a foundational concept for understanding psychic temporality, challenging linear models of causality and memory. From Freud's early trauma studies through Lacan's structural reformulation and Laplanche's theory of enigmatic signifiers, Nachträglichkeit demonstrates that human subjectivity is constituted through retroactive meaning-making. In clinical practice, contemporary theory, and interdisciplinary research, the concept continues to illuminate how past and present are mutually constitutive—how we are shaped not by what happened, but by what our experiences come to mean, afterward.

References

  1. ↑ Laplanche, J. & Pontalis, J.-B. (1973). The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press, p. 111.
  2. ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Jean Laplanche and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (London: Karnac Books, 1973), 111.
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis, trans. Jeffrey Mehlman (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 118–126.
  4. ↑ Sigmund Freud, "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1895), in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 1, ed. and trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1966), 295–343.
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer, Studies on Hysteria (1895), in Standard Edition, Vol. 2 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955).
  6. ↑ Sigmund Freud, Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), in Standard Edition, Vol. 7, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953), 125–245.
  7. ↑ 7.0 7.1 Sigmund Freud, "From the History of an Infantile Neurosis" (1918), in Standard Edition, Vol. 17, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 1–124.
  8. ↑ 8.0 8.1 Sigmund Freud, "Screen Memories" (1899), in Standard Edition, Vol. 3 (London: Hogarth Press, 1962), 299–322.
  9. ↑ Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), in Standard Edition, Vols. 4–5, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953).
  10. ↑ 10.0 10.1 Jacques Lacan, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious, or Reason Since Freud," in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 146–178.
  11. ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III: The Psychoses (1955–56), trans. Russell Grigg (New York: Norton, 1993), 268.
  12. ↑ 12.0 12.1 12.2 12.3 12.4 12.5 Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1964), trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1978), 206–207.
  13. ↑ Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book V: Formations of the Unconscious (1957–58), trans. Russell Grigg (Cambridge: Polity, 2017), 187–190.
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 14.2 Jean Laplanche, New Foundations for Psychoanalysis, trans. David Macey (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 126–127.
  15. ↑ 15.0 15.1 Jacques Lacan, "The Direction of the Treatment and the Principles of Its Power," in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977), 226–280.
  16. ↑ Sigmund Freud, "Constructions in Analysis" (1937), in Standard Edition, Vol. 23, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1964), 255–269.
  17. ↑ Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920), in Standard Edition, Vol. 18, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), 1–64.
  18. ↑ Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 17–24.
  19. ↑ Judith Lewis Herman, Trauma and Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence—from Domestic Abuse to Political Terror (New York: Basic Books, 1992), 39–56.
  20. ↑ Elizabeth Freeman, Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 3–16.
  21. ↑ Paul Ricœur, Time and Narrative, Vol. 1, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 52–54.
  22. ↑ Lynne Layton, "Irrational Exuberance: Neoliberal Subjectivity and the Perversion of Truth," in Nancy J. Chodorow, ed., The American Independent Tradition: Psychoanalysis and Social Critique (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 51–70.

Further Reading

  • Faimberg, Haydée. The Telescoping of Generations: Listening to the Narcissistic Links Between Generations. London: Routledge, 2005.
  • Fletcher, John. "Introduction to Jean Laplanche's 'Notes on Afterwardness.'" In Essays on Otherness, edited by John Fletcher, 260–265. London: Routledge, 1999.
  • Laplanche, Jean. "Notes on Afterwardness." In Essays on Otherness, edited by John Fletcher, 260–265. London: Routledge, 1999.
  • Thomä, Helmut, and Horst Kächele. Psychoanalytic Practice, Volume 1: Principles. Translated by M. Wilson and D. Roseveare. Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1987. [Chapter on temporality]

See Also

References


References


See Also

References

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