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II. EVOLUTION OF THE CONCEPT IN FREUD
II. A. The Word Nachträglichkeit and its Translations As was his custom, Freud forged the noun Nachträglichkeit (a neologism) from an adjective and adverb in everyday German, nachträglich . Nachträglich and its derivatives are recorded about 160 times in the works of Freud only six of which concern the noun Nachträglichkeit, while the others pertain to the adjective or the adverb (Thomä and Cheshire, 1991); an additional five uses of the noun can be found in the letter to Fließ dated 14 November 1897 (Freud, 1892-1899, p. 268), and a further instance in the letter dated 9 June 1898 (Masson, 1985, p. 544). In German, the term Nachträglichkeit is formed from nach (after) and tragen (to draw, to pull, to carry, to bear). From a semiotic standpoint, it means to draw towards an after-effect . The suffix “ keit ” gives it the feminine gender. Freud also employs equivalent terms, which can be translated into English by post-effect, post-action, ex-post (i.e. starting from what comes after) as well as expressions using the adverb nachträglich in the sense of “after the event”. It is possible to find: additional comprehension, elaboration, compulsion, obedience, action, effect “after the event”; or in French “après-coup” (Chervet, 2009). In French Nachträglichkeit is translated by the term après-coup . The French term is sometimes used directly in English psychoanalytic literature perhaps because there is no satisfactory translation in English, but mostly because this concept has acquired its specific and deepest meanings in French psychoanalysis. In English, the official translation is deferred action (Auchincloss and Samberg, 2012), but some English authors use also after-effect or afterwardsness , as proposed by Laplanche (1989- 90), or subsequent effect . In the United States, Arnold Modell (1989) proposed first another English translation of Nachträglichkeit, namely subsequentiality and Latin a posteriori , but he ultimately reverted back to Freud’s German original term Nachträglichkeit. An examination of the concept’s use in Spanish-language writings shows that it has been translated in different ways, including deferred effect, après-coup, retroactive action, re- signification, a posteriori . In Latin America, the terms used most frequently are a posteriori , retroactive action, après-coup, and also the German word Nachträglichkeit. II. B. The Two-Stage Process In Freud’s writings, the noun Nachträglichkeit gradually came to refer to an unconscious psychic process and its manifest results, initiated by an event of traumatic character, a “shock” which turns into a “shocking” event. More precisely, it refers to a dynamic process
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