10 years after submitting The sick child to Høstustillingen, Munch revised it in accordance with a newly found aesthetic conviction, displayed in his Frieze of life. The revision was an effort to annex The sick child in retrospect to the Frieze, distorting its original intention. The sick child stands out from Munch’s other works, bearing witness to a personal drama. It was a portrait from memory of a sister who died when the artist was 13 years old. It took him 10 years to finish the painting, and in this note, I shall focus on this long and complicated process with the assistence of Freud’s concept “Nachträglichkeit”.