Nachtraglichkeit Revisited

Nachtraglichkeit has been translated into English as deferred action or afterwardness, and in French as apres-coup, literally after-blow. Freud used the word initially to describe how sexually charged encounters in childhood produce traumatic effects after the fact, when puberty ascribes new meanings to these memories. In this article, I consider a greatly expanded, radicalized view of nachtraglichkeit as encompassing any enactment or insight that generates an experience of retrospective disorganization. I consider both a traumatic, destructive dimension of nachtraglichkeit and an everyday, expansive dimension of nachtraglichkeit, such as emerges in the clinical situation, in which small-scale disorganizations and reorganizations of the past allow for an enlarged sense of self and world. In considering nachtraglichkeit from the everyday, developmental dimension, I consider how the phenomenon often emerges out of an expanded field of inquiry formed of two minds elaborating backwards around the experiences of one.