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This issue of the Revue Française de Psychanalyse is focused on Freud's concept of Nachträglichkeit, known in English by Strachey's much criticized translation as deferred action and to the French as après-coup. There has been a more recent attempt to introduce an English neologism, afterwardsness, for the concept. The French regard the concept as extremely important, even fundamental, to psychoanalysis, and it has also sometimes been claimed as an exclusively French contribution to psychoanalysis, so important that it is sometimes regarded as the central concept in French psychoanalysis. It has been used as a shibboleth that separates Francophone from Anglophone psychoanalytic theory. It is a notion that, aside from a few articles, seems relatively little used, little known, little discussed, and poorly understood in Anglophone psychoanalytic literature.
Après-coup is not an easy concept to explain; there are controversies around the various interpretations of it. Attempts at clarification are the concern of most of the articles in this issue of the Revue and will be my task as well. Since most, if not all, of the contributions to this volume give, expound, or assume a rather detailed knowledge of the history of the concept, perhaps the best approach is to summarize its intriguing history by way of introducing its complex and sometimes puzzling aspects and the various modes of addressing these problems. Some of this historical material has already appeared in English—for example, in articles