We invite you to participate in the IPC 2026 conference!
Dear colleagues, it’s our pleasure to invite you to participate in the third conference, "The Resonant Silence of Après-Coup," which will be devoted to the relatively neglected concept of Nachtraglichkeit. We invite you to enter the metatheatre of the analytic concept of the "enigmatic signifier." (J. Laplanche). Discussions during our previous conferences devoted to trauma and regression naturally lead us to this line of inquiry.
In 1895, S. Freud introduced a concept of Nachtraeglichkeit (in German), later rendered as après-coup (in French) in French, and as последействие (in Russian), as deferred action( in English).
This concept designates a process through which past, silent events, experiences, and traumas acquire a new significance within analytic work.
The word " Nachtraeglichkeit" derives from the verb "Tragen," which means "to carry." The suffix "keit" signifies "a state" or process extended over time, and the prefix "nach" is close to the Russian word for "after" (compound words in German are translated from the end of the word).
The challenges of translating this concept into other languages has sparked debate in the psychoanalytic community.
The word « Nachtraeglichkeit" was first mentioned in Freud’s work " Entwurf einer Psychologie" (1895), illustrated by the well-known case of Emma. In this work, published posthumously, Freud gives a first detailed account of the mechanism of "Nachträglichkeit." He shows how a past event an early experience (a visit to a bakery of a little girl at the age of eight) acquires traumatic significance only after puberty following a second event at the age of 12. In 1896, in a letter to W. Fliess, Freud describes the process of rewriting psychic traces (Niederschriften), indicating that memory is reworked in accordance with new circumstances and the level of development achieved. During his illness, when Freud gave up smoking cigars he wrote to his friend about his suffering, "there's a lack of warmth in my mouth." This prompted him to reflect on the origins of this state of mind in infancy. It is here that he uses the word term Nachtraeglichkeit, "the material that forms mystical traces is from time to time, depending on the circumstances, subject to rearrangement and rewriting" (Freud to Fliess, 1896).
Freud later applied this concept to the case of Emma, Dora, and the Wolf Man (1918).
In his 1945 article "Logical Time and the Affirmation of Anticipatory Certainty," Lacan reintroduced the concept of après-coup, but in a far more complex way, than Freud.
Laplanche and Pontalis wrote that this concept is linked to the notion of "psychic time and causality," the nonlinearity of psychic time temporality. In his theory of seduction (1987), Laplanche viewed après-coup as a twofold process: regression (backward motion): a new present event "revives" an old trace, and progression (forward motion): the original message was already a "message from the future," waiting to be translated.
When we discuss après-coup, we are not talking about continuity, but a structure of meaning based on the discontinuity of forward movement (Green, 2000). The process of après-coup affects the experience of time, accelerating or slowing it down.
In everyday experience , the analyst listens to the patient with a "free floating" attention, without any specific goals or intentions. Then the patient may say or do something that triggers in the analyst a memory of something previously mentioned by the patient. What was said or done gives a new retrospective meaning to the material rediscovered by the analyst. Sometimes this is the starting point for interpretation. (G. Diatkine)
In analysis, the patient works through past events in après-coup, and that is the very revision that imparts meaning and makes previously silent events acquire start resonating.
In transference, the analyst reinterprets the patient's past experiences at a symbolic level. In light of modern psychoanalytic views, we can also speak of the archaic, the unrepresented, which receives its meaning in analysis through après-coup (R. Roussillon).
The return of unintegrated experiences into the psyche may occur in the form of hallucinations provoking a “borderline situation”; the somatic body “speaks,” trying to relate a story dominated by sensory-perceptual and motor records. (Roussillon, 2014)