Glossary

I have suggested a differentiation between the notions of descriptive après-coup and dynamic après-coup. Descriptive après-coup, as used in colloquial psychoanalysis, simply means retrospective signification. Dynamic après-coup, on the other hand, includes various notions of temporality, such as fixation, regression, repetition compulsion and the return of the repressed. These different notions of time refer to the heterochrony in psychoanalysis (Green, 2002). Furthermore, dynamic après-coup is connected to a network of concepts such as trauma, castration and infantile sexuality, giving a specific meaning to the whole body of Freud’s theory (Perelberg, 2006). It is the linkage of après-coup to this network of concepts that gives it a meta-psychological dimension. It is après-coup that meaning can be comprehended ‘in the last instance’ (2006, p. 120). The temporality of the après-coup, establishing the links between the here and now and there and then, marks the passage from a dyadic to a triadic structure in an analysis (Perelberg, 2013a, p. 581).

Freud progressively elaborated his views on psychic bisexuality, starting in his correspondence with Fliess. In “Psychogenesis of a Case of Homosexuality in a Woman”, he suggested that the aim of an analytic process should be to restore “full bisexual functions” (Freud, 1920a, p. 171). “The economy of each person’s sexuality (to give the word the full wealth of meaning that psychoanalysis confers on it) is based on an ever-fragile relationship between the assertion of bisexuality and the assertion of sexual specificity. Reckoning with the oscillation between femininity and masculinity – a constant in our psychic life – with the highly composite nature of the concept of sexual difference, and with the fact that the individual psychosexual position – I mean each

person’s position on the infinitely varied spectrum of concrete sexualities – is the result of a long and h