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linking an initial traumatic event, its repression during a period of undetermined length, and a regressive psychic work transforming the libidinal economy of the repressed event, and the promotion of “posthumous returns” of the repressed event, according to variable manifest forms, which are substitutive psychic products. The adjective and the adverb, nachträglich, emphasize the diachronic organization of the thought process in two stages , and the causal and determinant link that exists between them. The concept of the après-coup is thus a process ( Proceβ ) that consists of two manifest stages and a latent one which involves unconscious psychic processes ( Vorgang ). It is worth pointing out that Freud far more frequently refers descriptively to this two-stage process than using the noun Nachträglichkeit. II. C. The Birth of the Concept In the “Project for a Scientific Psychology” (1895a,b), only the adverb appears in connection with the case of Emma. Freud insists on the precociousness of the sexual unbinding and its subsequent consequences. Then, in 1896, he speaks of the posthumous effect of an infantile trauma . In 1897, he forges the noun in his letters to Fließ. In “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900) the two-way movements (from the present to the past, and from the past back to the future/present) are apparent in a humorous recount of a patient (an admirer of feminine beauty) stating that he wished he had taken a full opportunity of his wet nurse breastfeeding him in the past, while – as an adult – observing another attractive wet nurse breastfeeding a baby. From this point on, the phenomenon loses its specificity in the realm of pathogenesis of psychoneuroses and it becomes a part of everyday thinking, including humor and wit. In “Little Hans” (1909b), his interpretations follow the rationality of the after-effect without naming it as such. This was not to be the case in the text on “The Wolf Man” (1918c) in which he gives greater complexity to the concept by considering the sessions themselves and the transference as the third after-effects necessary to the aim of the treatment. The famous dream of the wolves and the phobia of the wasps were both the first and second après-coups of the primal scene which happened earlier and which was not assimilated at this time. In this text, the notion of time becomes very important to Freud who tries to date each of the events. Remarkably enough, from 1917 onwards the term Nachträglichkeit disappears – with a few minor exceptions – from his writings, whereas the implication of the two-phase process becomes more frequent. Freud created this concept at a time when his research was dominated by his aetiological preoccupations. The latter became isomorphic with the tendency, already observed by Breuer, to recall by following a backward temporal path. Breuer had described a retrogression (i.e. the fact of taking up history from a precise point in the past and of repeating it with the aim of reconstructing it and freeing oneself from it) that had allowed him to conceive
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