Deferred Action

This notion is important to any understanding of the psychoanalytic conception of time. It implies a complex and reciprocal relationship between a significant event and its later reinvestment with meaning, a rein-vestment that lends it a new psychic efficacy.

It was the French reading and translation of Freud that brought out the import of "nachträglich" and "Nachträglichkeit," terms which had not hitherto been consistently translated into either French or English.

The index of Freud's Gesammelte Werke has...