IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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the cathartic method (Freud & Breuer, 1895a). Freud followed the path of this temporal regression and added to it an obligation to express itself by means of verbalization, thus by the production of verbal deferred effects. He made use of this tendency to regress, associated with a constraint to maintain a verbal link with consciousness, in the service of the therapeutic aim. He thus promoted a new method, the psychoanalytical treatment defined by its protocol , its fundamental rule , which requires the verbal free association , and a specific psychical work, the work of the deferred effect . In his observation of Emma, in the “Project for a Scientific Psychology ” ‘s part II, chapter 4 “Hysterical Proton Pseudos” (1895b, p. 352), Freud gives a precise description of “deferred action” (Nachträglichkeit) by concentrating on the temporal regression within the sessions. He divides the first stage, that of the event, into two regressive scenes, of which one (scene I of two shop clerks mocking her dress when Emma is 12 years old) is recent and reconstituted, and the other (scene II of repressed memory from the time Emma was eight years old and was sexually touched through her dress/molested by a grocer) is earlier and unconscious in the strict sense of the word. He grounds his thinking in the theory of trauma of Charcot which he had already expounded in the “Studies of Hysteria” (Freud & Breuer, 1893- 1895), with the diachronic creation of symptoms in two stages, and the cathartic method of retrogression and associative elaboration of Breuer, but he differentiates himself by his thorough etiological research. He emphasises the backward direction of cathartic remembering as it takes place within the sessions and the sexual content of what has been repressed. Thus, he inverts the course of events and time. He calls scene I, the recent scene, “Emma’s memory of being laughed at by shop assistants on entering a shop when she was thirteen”, and scene II, the older one, ”the repressed memory of being sexually molested in another shop by the grocer when she was eight”. The second, symptomatic event was the agoraphobia involved in entering a shop alone. The two events are separated by a period of latency. The case of Emma, suffering from agoraphobia of shopping alone (later referred to as ‘Emma’s model of Nachträglichkeit’ in Post Freudian European and North American theorizing on the subject, and as a paradigm by Latin American theorizing) captures Freud’s early definition of Nachträglichkeit, but also his early understanding of the role of trauma, temporality and memory, sexuality, development, as well as defense, in neurosogenesis and in the clinical work, as summed up in his timeless statement: “Here we have the case of a memory arousing an affect which it did not arouse as an experience, because in the meantime the change [brought about] in puberty had made possible a different understanding of what was remembered. … We invariably find that a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action ” (Freud, 1895b, p. 356; italics added). In this statement, Nachträglichkeit is in the relationship between the terms memory-repression-trauma. The entire quote is the definition of the concept, whose dynamic results from the interplay between the three terms and their determining order among them: in relation with what is repressed, how it is repressed, how it becomes trauma, how memory reaches significance. It was already Jean-Martin Charcot who had described the chronological organisation of the symptoms of hysteria into two stages with a third, called the period of psychical incubation

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