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or psychical elaboration, located between the traumatic event (the shock) and the manifest after-effect (the symptom). As a pupil of Charcot (Freud was his German translator) and concerned to free psychical symptoms from the aetiological impasse of the theory of degeneration, Freud took seriously the chronological references of the Master of the Salpétrière Hospital. Consequently, he focused his attention on the intervening stage, and the non-visible psychical work, which unfolds there. II. D. The Period of Latency and the Regressive Psychical Work “The Interpretation of Dreams” (1900a,b) was the product of the attention Freud paid to the specific psychical work that takes place during the intermediary period designated by Charcot as the period of psychical incubation or psychical elaboration, and which Freud renamed the period of latency. This allowed Freud to take into account a new but commonplace psychical operation, the act of latency . A period of latency can easily be observed within the development of human sexuality with its two phases, but it also is seen in ordinary mental functioning. The act of putting into latency is an operation involved in the theory of dreams, in the oscillation between day and night, and is particularly observable from its after-effects during the sessions of hypnosis and analysis. The intervening events, namely, the night and the session of analysis, constitute periods of latency occupied by specific unconscious psychic work. The dream-work and its results, the libidinal regeneration on awakening, memory and the dream narrative, become prototypes of regressive psychical activities accomplished in the passivity of latency (Chervet, 2009). The logic of associative temporal regression, scene I (recent) – scene II (from the past), is part of the process of remembering which follows the retrogressive path. For Freud, only the manifest expression of the symptom is on the progressive path. Remembering is the link between adolescence and childhood, beginning with adolescence. It is the sexual precociousness of the traumatic event (scene II), which is reactivated in scene I during the resurgence of drive impulses in puberty. The common sexual dimension between (II) and (I) is clearly apparent. Consequently, what is referred to as deferred effect and initial shock, varies according to the point of view taken, whether that of the genesis of the symptom or that of the discourse of the sessions. According to the logic of the shock, it is the appearance of the symptom which is the deferred effect; according to the logic of looking for a cathartic effect, it is the successive memories which, beginning with the symptom, are the deferred effects; and according to psychoanalytic logic, each recall is a deferred effect of an unconscious memory which has acquired, subsequent to its repression, the value of a traumatic event (Freud, 1895b). In the first model, the effect is linked to a traumatic event; in the second, to the memory; and in the third, to the transference on to the analysis of the regressive attraction and the necessity of verbalisation.
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