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Winnicott’s touchstone of being fully and creatively alive, the process he called creative apperception, is only half the story. Creative apperception gives meaning to present-time experience by relating it to all that has made up a person’s life so far. But the past must also be able to take on fresh meaning. Creative apperception will only truly ‘make the individual feel that life is worth living’ (Winnicott, 1971a: 65; see p.5) if the present is related to a past that is reconstituted afresh in the present moment. What matters is not just how someone experiences their past but how they continue to re-experience it. As was discussed in Chapter 1, this is not passive recollection which simply readmits to consciousness what once disappeared from it, but the active operation of memory as an imaginative re-membering of the past. This makes possible an interchange between past and present—in either direction—that can rearticulate both to their mutual enrichment.
The process of giving fresh meaning to the past in the light of subsequent and present-day experience was described by Freud as ‘Nachträglichkeit’: ‘The traumas of childhood operate in a deferred fashion as though they were fresh experiences; but they do so unconsciously’ (Freud, 1896a: 167fn, Freud’s italics). The Standard Edition (1950–1974) of Freud’s works translated ‘Nachträglichkeit’ as ‘deferred action’, but this proved unmanageable, and the concept has become more familiarly and usefully known by the French term ‘après-coup’. What I described in Chapter 1 as the second aspect of the ‘work of remembering’ (p.10) turns out, in fact, to be no more nor less than après-coup. Two other French words are also relevant for their distinction between different kinds of memory. ‘Souvenir’, corresponding to the English ‘recollection’, denotes a memory, once present, that disappeared from consciousness and has now come back again. The more complex ‘remémoration’ refers to the work of memory which refashions the relati