Chapter 7 Time and the Après-Coup

Issues concerning time are at the basis of psychoanalytic theory, of the analytic setting and of the clinical phenomena we encounter. They also underlie important technical and theoretical differences in psychoanalytic approaches, implicitly or explicitly. French psychoanalysts have emphasised the non-linear form of the temporality of après-coup, contrasting with the more linear developmental model of British psychoanalysts. While the theorising differs in significant ways, clinically in the sessions the two forms of temporality, namely developmental and après-coup, go inherently together, one being a requisite for the other, and may be found as such in the British approach, as I will discuss.

Lacan was instrumental and credits himself (1966, p. 839) with extracting the significance of the notion of Nachträglichkeit in Freud's work. According to Laplanche and Pontalis (1967), its importance had not been previously recognised due to the fact that the same word was not used throughout in the translation of Freud (this is true of both the English and the French translation). In a later paper, Laplanche (1998b) adds that if the terms ‘nachträglich’ and ‘Nachträglichkeit’ were not always translated as the same word by Strachey, it was because, in fact, the meaning given by Freud varies between three different usages. The first simply means ‘later’. The second implies a movement from past to future: something is deposited in the individual, which is only activated later on – this is based on the model of the seduction theory where the trauma is constituted in two stages. The event leaves a trace, and in a second stage it has a psychic effect. Laplanche compares this to a delayed action bomb. Strachey's translation of Nachträglichkeit as ‘deferred action’, which many people now think is a bad translation and is

the reason why it has not been given importance in the English-speaking world, in fact conveys this particular meaning quite well. The idea, in this second meanin