Afterwardsness

In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, afterwardsness is a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events... [from the German word] Nachträglichkeit, translated as deferred action, retroaction, , afterwardsness". As summarized by another scholar, 'In one sense, Freud's theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience'.

The psychoanalytical concept of "afterwardsness" (German: Nachträglichkeit) appeared initially in Freud’s writings in the 1890s in the commonsense form of the German adjective-adverb "afterwards" or "deferred" (nachträglich): as Freud wrote in the unfinished and unpublished "A Project for a Scientific Psychology" of 1895, 'a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event '. However the 'theory of deferred action had already been [publicly] put forward by Freud in the Studies on Hysteria (1895)', and in a paper of 1896 'he elaborates on the idea of deferred action: the pathogenic effect of a traumatic event occurring in childhood...[manifesting] retrospectively when the child reaches a subsequent phase of sexual development'.

The same idea would feature prominently a couple of decades later in his study of the "Wolf Man": 'The effects of the scene were deferred, but...had the same effect as though it were a recent experience'. 'Thus although he never offered a definition, much less a general theory, of the notion of deferred action, it was indisputably looked on by Freud as part of his conceptual equipment'.

It has been suggested that it was Lacan who brought the term back from obscurity after Freud's death — his translation in the French language as the "" fits into the context of his "return to Freud" ("rapport de Rome", 1953) — and certainly French psychoanalysis has since taken the lead in its explication. Lacan himself claimed in his Seminar that "the real implication of the nachträglich, for example, has been ignored, though it was there all the time and had only to be picked up," while writing in Ecrits of "'deferred action' (Nachtrag), to rescue another of these terms from the facility into which they have since fallen...they were unheard of at that time."

After Lacan’s après-coup, Jean Laplanche’s contribution to the concept of the afterwardsness signifies something very different: with Jean Laplanche and in the relation to Freud (theory of the seduction, neurotica), Lacan's "Other" loses its capital letter of the "Symbolic", that links Lacan to French structuralism (Saussure's linguistics, Lévi-Strauss's ethnology), and that links also Lacan afterwards in the history of the ideas (from the 1960s on) — by "inversion in the opposite direction" (a "destiny of the drive" in psychoanalytic theory) — to the at the place of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction.

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