‘As I was walking down the stair, I saw a concept which wasn't there …’: Or, après-coup: A missing concept?

As I was walking down the stair,

I saw a man who wasn't there.

He wasn't there again today …

I wish that man would go away!

Guarding against the influence of a Mrs Bennett kind of logic (in which ‘it is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife’1) in my conception of what an ideal psychoanalytical marriage should be, I need to keep in mind the strange but undoubtedly true fact that a lot of analysts live happily ever after, being excellent analysts, without ever needing to have recourse to the concept of projective identification. A similar question must be in the minds of colleagues for whom the concept of après-coup is both fundamental in their theoretical thinking and of everyday clinical use. I never find myself missing the concept of après-coup … and yet, of course, once I set my mind to it and read the paper I am now discussing, as well as several other excellent papers by Haydée Faimberg touching on this subject and some of the rest of the literature, après-coup starts popping up in my mind at entirely unexpected and surprising places. If you had a look at my computer files today, you would see that ‘the concept which wasn't there’ has, totally behind my back, managed to infiltrate the two papers I am currently working on …

Faimberg's contributions to the study of après-coup are very important and, for me, especially interesting in the area of what she calls ‘listening to listening’ (1996), by which she means a very close reading of her patient's response to each interpretation; in the misunderstandings which always occur between what was said and what was heard, she listens very closely to the unconscious identifications with internal objects, which lead to (re)constructions. The concept of après-coup is thus broadened to include transformations that take place after each interpretation, making the retrospective attribution of new meaning possible. The focus is on the here-and-now of the transfer