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In this book Fletcher lavishes attention on Freudian texts, meticulously following Freud's ideas and theories on trauma and fantasy, with all their twists and turns. Inspired by the work of Jean Laplanche and his theories of “après coup,” together with the French tradition of textual analysis, Fletcher pieces together a remarkable narrative of changing emphases and irrational hiccups seen from the perspective of one looking for meaning in all corners.
The search for meaning focuses not around trauma as injury, but rather on scenes of trauma, a shift with considerable significance since it addresses trauma not as injury but rather as something interpretable. The question then becomes, how can the reality of these “scenes” remain curiously unquestioned when memory is so unreliable, and screen memories can work both forwards and backwards. The question is answerable if one accepts Laplanche's assumption that the primal scene is real, however unreliable memories may be. And that assumption rules out other contenders for the position of underlying reality, such as birth trauma or human vulnerability. In this Laplanche is following directly in the footsteps of Descartes, who could doubt the testimony of the senses as long as there was a reliable underlying reality, God.
Fletcher suggests that Freud creates a mutually exclusive divide “between fantasy and real event” retrospectively. Thus the theme of “après coup” taken from Laplanche becomes the leitmotif of Fletcher's book, and the means by which Freud's discontinuities can be seamlessly interpreted. The “psychical scenography” in Studies in Hysteria is “governed by a distinctive temporal logic” (p. 60) that Freud calls “Nachtäglichkeit,” and that Laplanche translates as “après coup” (retrospective foresight?), a concept too clever by half. This is manifested by a striking “contradiction in Freud's argument between the deferred and the premature” (p. 73) between memories “acting directly in the present like a current event