Talk:Afterwardness
{{Infobox_concept3 | name = Afterwardness | original_term = Nachträglichkeit | original_language = de | literal_translation = Belatedness, Deferredness | french_term = Après-coup | alternative_terms = Deferred action (Strachey), Retroaction, Deferred understanding | translation_notes = The term Nachträglichkeit appears sporadically in Freud's writings but was inconsistently translated in the Standard Edition. Early translations as "deferred action" have been critiqued for implying simple delay rather than the complex retroactive constitution of meaning. French psychoanalysis adopted après-coup (literally "after the fact"), which Laplanche and Pontalis established as the standard French term in their 1967 Language of Psychoanalysis. Contemporary English usage increasingly prefers "afterwardness" to capture the temporal paradox involved—that earlier experiences acquire traumatic significance only retroactively, through later events that re-signify them.
| first_appearance = 1895 | first_appearance_text = Project for a Scientific Psychology | originating_thinker = Sigmund Freud | tradition = Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacanian psychoanalysis | theoretical_field = Trauma theory, Memory, Psychic temporality, Metapsychology | clinical_significance = Central to understanding symptom formation, the temporal structure of trauma, and the retroactive effects of analytic interpretation
| relation_1_target = Repression | relation_1_type = Presupposes | relation_1_content = Afterwardness operates within the logic of repression: an experience becomes repressed only after it has acquired pathogenic meaning through retroactive signification.
| relation_2_target = Screen memory | relation_2_type = Contrasts with | relation_2_content = While screen memories involve the substitution of one memory for another, afterwardness concerns the temporal constitution of traumatic meaning itself—not distortion but belated production.
| relation_3_target = Repetition compulsion | relation_3_type = Contrasts with | relation_3_content = Repetition enacts what afterwardness structurally enables: the return of repressed material that has become significant only retroactively.
| relation_4_target = Symptom formation | relation_4_type = Manifests in | relation_4_content = Symptoms emerge when earlier experiences are retroactively reorganized by later developmental stages or events, producing compromise formations.
| relation_5_target = Transference | relation_5_type = Manifests in | relation_5_content = Transference reactivates earlier relationships not as they were but as re-signified within the present analytic situation—a clinical demonstration of afterwardness.
| relation_6_target = Trauma | relation_6_type = Related to | relation_6_content = Trauma is not defined by objective event intensity but by failure of symbolization that becomes apparent only afterward, through afterwardness.
| relation_7_target = The signifier | relation_7_type = Presupposes | relation_7_content = In Lacanian theory, afterwardness is inseparable from the retroactive production of meaning through signifying chains.
| relation_8_target = The unconscious | relation_8_type = Presupposes | relation_8_content = Afterwardness describes a specifically unconscious temporal structure, distinct from conscious retrospection or hindsight.
| relation_9_target = Memory | relation_9_type = Presupposes | relation_9_content = Challenges archival models of memory; memory in psychoanalysis is reconstructive, not reproductive, shaped by afterwardness.
| relation_10_target = Causality | relation_10_type = Related to | relation_10_content = Afterwardness challenges linear causal models by proposing retroactive causation at the level of psychic meaning.
| theorist_1_name = Sigmund Freud | theorist_1_role = Originator | theorist_1_key_move = Introduced the temporal logic of afterwardness in early trauma theory, showing that childhood experiences become traumatic only retroactively through later re-signification, though he did not systematically theorize the concept under a single term | theorist_1_texts = Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895), Studies on Hysteria (1895), Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905), Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920)
| theorist_2_