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This paper examines a divergence in psychoanalytic models whose roots can be seen 75 years ago in the Controversial Discussions in the British Psychoanalytical Society. The present issue is: What sort of representations can there be of memories which a mind seems too vulnerable to tolerate? The origins of this longstanding issue lie in the differing assumptions about the earliest moments of life.
The issue came to the fore when, in 1973 , Laplanche and Pontalis drew attention to Freud's term, Nachträglichkeit and its translations (often inaccurate) into French and English. Laplanche and Pontalis argued that in Freud's view it is important that the past is reformulated in the present, and that we should not consider the present as merely a deterministic recapitulation of the past. More recently it has become a widely discussed concept as après coup, and in English as «afterwardness» (Stanton, 1993, Figlio, 1993). Memories are always influenced by current experience (Schachter, 1989), and they are always reconstructed each time they are retrieved. In fact, the effects of our treatments would be non-existent if no post-memorial modifications were not possible.
The upshot has been to consider if there are memories that are not actually processed at all, even at the time: that is, memories that cannot be represented in the