The Trauma of Looking Back
Nachträglichkeit from Freud to Neuroscience
By Eva D. Papiasvili
Photographs by Ian Campbell
In his observation of Emma in the unpublished manuscript “Project for a Scientific Psychology” of 1895, Freud depicts two scenes: Scene I is of two shop clerks mocking Emma’s dress when she is 13 years old; scene II is a repressed memory from the time Emma was 8 years old and was sexually touched through her dress by a grocer. The two events are separated by a period of latency. Emma’s fear of entering shops by herself following Scene I could be explained by this scene’s association with Scene II and by her new understanding of the sexual content of that earlier scene.
The Emma model captures Freud’s early understanding of the role of trauma, temporality, and memory in the clinical work of cathartic remembering. In Freud’s words, “Here we have the case of a memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered.”
In short, “We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action.”
A year later, in his letter to Fliess, Freud pens a statement which is most relevant to a wide range of studies, including contemporary neuroscience: “Memory is present not once but several times over … the successive registrations (of memory) represent the psychic achievement of successive epochs in life. At the boundary between two such epochs a translation of the psychic material must take place.”
Nachträglichkeit
Freud’s realization that certain events had greater traumatic power upon recollection led to his formulation of one of his most complex conceptualizations, Nachträglichkeit, which can be seen in retrospect as the birth of developmental model in psychoanalysis. Translated by Strachey as “deferred action” or “deferred effect,” Nachträglichkeit (a neologism, derived from a common German adjective and adverb Nachträglich) was prominently revived as “après coup” (after-shock) by Jacques Lacan in the mid1950s, and, by Laplanche, as “afterwardsness.” Contemporary definitions in different psychoanalytic cultures stress different aspects of how, through the operation of Nachträglichkeit, experiences are retrospectively reactivated, reconstructed, and revised to fit in with fresh experiences or with the attainment of a new stage of psychosexual development. (See Nachträglichkeit: Global Developments below.)
The concept of Nachträglichkeit is relevant to all memory’s varied forms: memory is a living system, constantly reconfiguring itself through a dialectical process of preserving the old while integrating the new. From both a neurobiological and a psychoanalytic point of view, periodic reconfiguration represents the very living character of memory, but it is also the locus of a struggle within the human psyche. This happens whenever memory’s active “imprints” or “engrams” threaten to gravely disrupt the stable memory structure of the ego or the self, or when that structure was so badly damaged or distorted in its growth that it cannot easily integrate new experiences and is condemned to repeating old patterns instead of introjecting or integrating new experiences. In this sense, all psychopathology can be ascribed to a difficulty in the necessary reconfiguration of memory.
From the Wolf Man to Neuroscience
In the case of “The Wolf Man” of 1918, Freud gives greater complexity to the concept of Nachträglichkeit by considering the psychoanalytic sessions themselves with dreams, free associations, and the transference as the third after-effects (the third scene/third après coup) necessary to the aim of the treatment. This case is a detailed clinical account of the four-year analysis of a depressed, severely dysfunctional young adult, who in Freud’s words “broke down after an organic affection of the genitals had revived his fear of castration and shattered his narcissism.” His troubled childhood, replete with phobias and obsessions, was reconstructed in analysis, which prominently included the nightmarish dream on his 4th birthday of motionless wolves perched in a walnut tree. According to Freud, this famous dream of the wolves and his ensuing phobia of wolves (and other symptoms) were the first and second après-coups of the primal scene (witnessing parental intercourse) which happened earlier when he was 18 months old and were not assimilated at the time. The third après-coup then was the unfolding psychoanalytic process, during which the first and second après-coups were emerging out of repression and painfully relived and repeated in transference.
In the case history, Freud infers that an actual parental primal scene experience and later associated sexual seduction by his sister and nanny shattered the Wolf Man’s psychosexual development via deferred action. Freud proposed that this primal scene at 18 months was not experienced as traumatic until a developmental reorganization at age 4 took place. An earlier memory became a “retrospective trauma” under new conditions. In this text, the role of Nachträglichkeit in psychosexual development becomes paramount, initiating contemporary studies of complexities involved in developmental transformation, reflecting the internal capacity to organize and reorganize experience, and consolidate and reconsolidate new psychic structures and formations, throughout life.
After 1918, Freud used the terms Nachträglichkeit and Nachträglich seldom. Nevertheless, the unconscious processes pertaining to this idea are ever-present in his work, from the start to the finish, notably in connection with regression, repression, transference, reconstruction, construction, and many others. Nachträglichkeit undergirds Freud’s “return of the repressed” in individual development, development of neuroses (neurosogenesis), macrosocial context, and artistic sublimation and aesthetics.
Memory is a living system, constantly reconfiguring itself through a dialectical process of preserving the old while integrating the new.
Similar ideas also exist outside the psychoanalytic literature. Nachträglichkeit, as the retranscription of memory, is relevant to a current neurobiological theory of memory as recategorization. According to neuroscientist Gerald Edelman’s Global Theory of Brain Functioning (GTBF), what is stored is potentiality (categories) awaiting activation. One hundred years prior, Freud repeatedly theorized that the affective traces of the earliest nonrepresented and nonsymbolized scenes of events happening during the first year of life—their “quota of affect” — are inscribed in the mnemic system. He was convinced that the nondischarged quota of affect remained fixed as a representative of the drive, so that its mnemic trace was stored in memory. In contemporary parlance, Freud’s Nachträglichkeit is a sophisticated theory of the recontextualization of memories. Both Freud and Edelman consider memory to be a dynamic plastic system, modifiable by subsequent affectively contextually bound experiences. Recent neuroscientific findings corroborating this proposition have been heralded by Mark Solms as a “triumph of psychoanalysis.”
Developmental theorist and child analyst Theodore Gaensbauer summarized the neurobiology of brain activity, including mirror neuron systems, and coined the term “deferred imitation” for various forms of enactment throughout life of “embodied” traumatic scenes that months-old children were subjected to or witnessed, but did not remember. The mirror neuron system mediates the repetitive mirroring/enacting/imitating of the whole traumatic scene sensomotorically, psychosomatically, and in images—hence the connection with the dimension of dreams and unconscious fantasy in the Wolf Man’s case. At the center of contemporary neuropsychoanalytic interest, repetitive enactments of imprints stored in experiential mnemic systems can come alive in the therapeutic setting, where they can be translated, interpreted, and recontextualized, as I have documented elsewhere.
Clinically, psychoanalysts are constantly dealing with ways of remembering, whether in terms of recollections or of repetitions. The situated nature of psychoanalytic investigation entails that any form of memory can be summoned within the transference relationship, entering a more complex dynamic of Nachträglichkeit than what can be observed in standardized laboratory experiments.
Taking Up the Past
Nearly forgotten, Nachträglichkeit is emerging from obscurity as one of the central concepts of interconnected psychic processes involved in development of psychic structure and sexuality, theory of thinking, representation and affects, temporality, causality, and dynamic links between memory, trauma, and fantasy. Inspiring further elaboration and refinement, the dialectic spiral movement between the present, the past, and the future contained in the “time of Nachträglichkeit” guards against simplification and fragmentation. Ultimately, psychoanalysis itself has become the study of the seemingly incomprehensible “afterwardsness” of early experience.
Nachträglichkeit: Global Developments
Adapted from the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis
Various directions of subsequent and contemporary studies of Nachträglichkeit worldwide reflect the nonlinear and multidimensional complexity of Freud’s conceptualization.
In Europe, French psychoanalysis was in the forefront of the concept’s revival. Lacan’s concept of après-coup emphasizes that the operation of après-coup is never over; that it draws towards an after-effect. Here, “the after” awaits until “the before” will have assumed its rightful place. Contemporary French analytic authors like Haydée Faimberg and Bernard Chervet further broaden, refine, and retain the spiral circular dynamic of emergence-disappearance-return as core dynamic formulation of constructive aspects of psychoanalytic processes. Most of them pay a particular attention to the work realized by the process of après-coup on the traumatic regressive economy of the drives. In this context, Nachträglichkeit as après-coup refers to the process engaged in all the modalities of psychic elaboration, as it is principally involved in the installation of erotic life and thought itself. Interesting work of Faimberg, who draws on Winnicott, includes broadening Nachträglichkeit temporality into the future with the anticipation of the “trauma that already had happened” to repeat itself.
In contrast to French psychoanalysis, where archaic elements and primal repression are constructed against “regressive attraction,” for contemporary British object relation theorists, following Klein and Bion, the primitive anguish is already there. Within the context of contemporary British authors then, it is the work of psychoanalysis to combat and transform such fragmentary and disorganizing feelings of terror.
From a Latin American perspective, the concept is a code for the unique temporality of the unconscious, associated with the laws of the primary process, causality, the logic of the unconscious, sexuality, repression, and repetition. As an operation of temporality, and as a means of constructing meaning, Nachträglichkeit may be latently present where repression occurs, and signify a memory where a memory becomes a trauma.
In North America, Nachträglichkeit is seen by many as the birth of the developmental model in psychoanalysis, which in a complex manner includes the nonlinearity of unconscious contents and processes; and a precursor of the concept of developmental transformation, which includes the bidirectionality of regression and progression, the dialectics of the underlying force seeking symbolization as well as repression and repetition.
In other strands of North American thinking, psychoanalysis itself can be viewed as the study of the Nachträglichkeit of early-life events, through multiple realities inherent in the psychoanalytic setting, which (re)construct symbolic bridges between the unassimilated traumatic events and their resignification and transformation into representable experiences, process which can facilitate creation of qualitatively new subjectivities and expansion of meanings, spanning across generations.
Overall, the two temporal vectors of Nachträglichkeit as deferment and retroactive retranscription/resignification can be seen as complementary and as corresponding to dialectics of both reconstructive and constructive psychoanalytic process.
Find more on Nachträglichkeit and related conceptualizations, visit IRED.
Eva D. Papiasvili, PhD, ABPP, is the Global Chair of the Tri-Regional Editorial Board of the IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis (IRED).
Published January 2025