Chapter 10 Après-Coup: Revisiting What has Been Read* (1998/2003)

When writing on the concept of après-coup and when reflecting about this book retroactively, après-coup, I realized that I should avoid any temptation to propose a synthesis or anything that could be taken for a unified conception of psychoanalytical thinking. I shall seek to convey how I understand the concept and how I have been thinking psychoanalytically when using it in this book.

Après-coup is the French translation of a concept designated by Freud as Nachträglichkeit (noun) and nachträglich (adjective). The latter is a common word in German, perhaps one of the reasons why the concept of nachträglich and Nachträglichkeit, in the sense we understand après-coup, has not acquired in the German psychoanalytical culture the same pregnancy as it has in the French one, since translation has called for reflection.

As we know, there is no article written by Freud specifically centred on this concept. This may at least partially explain its variable fate. So we give credit to Lacan for being the first in 1953 to underline the importance of this Freudian concept referring exclusively to the Wolf Man case. Laplanche and Pontalis were the first to draw attention to the general importance of the concept, first in ‘Fantasy and the origins of sexuality’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1964, ‘Primal fantasy, fantasies of origins, origins of fantasy’) and then in The Language of Psychoanalysis . In the first article they refer to the classic paper by Susan Isaacs (1948) on unconscious phantasy;1 in a perspective different from the ‘principle of genetic continuity’, as outlined by Isaacs, they introduce the ‘operation of après-coup’ to reflect on (among other problems) the status of fantasy.

Nachträglichkeit was translated by Strachey as ‘deferred action’. As Laplanche points out, in certain contexts in Freud's work this translation is correct. By