Response to Ignês Sodré

I very much appreciate Ignês Sodré's thoughtful response to my paper. With her insightful humour, she made me think that the concept that wasn't there, and wasn't there again today, may well be there … once again as an absence that is a presence that attacks. This is because, for her, the concept that did not exist is considered valuable by analysts who write in a way that is meaningful to her. So the concept, from being non-existent starts to exist. Should we ask it to go away?

She writes that in the papers she is currently preparing the concept is there in a different way. But, Ignês, please, do not lose your creativity or your sense of humour!

Reading Ignês Sodré's reply, I deduce that I did not manage to assemble the elements needed for us to celebrate together the overcoming of the following dilemma based on the binary logic either/or: whether we should interpret in the present or in the past, a dilemma that for some time divided the psychoanalytical community. I confess that I was hoping to ‘surprise’ Ignês Sodré on this point, having proposed one of the possible solutions on the basis of a dialectical conception of intrapsychic time.

The fact is that in the operation of après-coup a complex and reciprocal temporal dialectic comes into play—a dialectical logic that establishes the possible conditions for overcoming this dilemma, which is based on a binary logic. In that sense the proposal to consider two forms of après-coup (‘short-span’ and ‘long-span’) seems to re-establish the duality (between interpreting in the present and interpreting in the past).

I shall follow my reasoning by coming back to the vignette with Brigitte, when I interpret: ‘If so, … I wonder who it might be?’ The effects of this interpretation serve to contextualise my first interpretation because her associations lead us to an intrapsychic unconscious scene. This scene is characterised by the discourse of a kind of mother that deprives Brigitte of a father. This intrapsychic scene—of key imp