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Freud's theory of childhood seduction trauma went through many iterations both during his own lifetime of thought and afterwards, as its deferred impact on psychoanalytic theory and practice stimulated much retrospective reconsideration and revision. The present book, Après-coup, a collection of lectures and essays by Jean Laplanche, provides, through the lens of time, a way back to the study of the evolution of Freud's theories of seduction and trauma and then a way forward to Laplanche's own general theory of seduction and the recurrently traumatic impact of the enigmatic message. This is the most recent production of the American press, The Unconscious in Translation, which has tasked itself with the eventual translation of Laplanche's entire oeuvre into English. Considering this an important project (full disclosure), I was glad to copy edit at no charge their recent translation of New Foundations for Psychoanalysis; hence I am acknowledged in a general way in this book, although I had no part in the present production. The main work in this volume is the first English translation of Laplanche's Problematiques VI, L'après-coup (2006), his own written presentation of a nine-lecture series given at the University of Paris between November 1989 and February 1990. Directly related to a psychoanalytic theory of time, the lectures focus on Freud's Nachträglichkeit—both the word and the concept—in all its ambiguity and incompleteness. Après-coup has become, as I will clarify below, the French translation of Nachträglichkeit, while deferred action was Strachey's choice for the Standard Edition—a decision criticized by many.
The other works in this book are “Temporality and Translation” and its “Debate,” dating from the year before the lectures, and “Time and the