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Jean Laplanche was to follow this conception by integrating it into his personal theory of a generalized seduction in which the maternal messages implanted in the child’s unconscious continue to produce after-effects or successive translations owing to their enigmatic valency linked to their sexual nature. The transference becomes an infinite “transference of transference”. The whole of French psychoanalysis in the second half of the 20th century has taken advantage of this stimulus given by Lacan. There are many French writers who have continued to explore in depth the notion of après-coup (Le Guen, 1982; Laplanche, 1989-90; Chervet, 2006, 2009, 2010; André, 2009), or who have used this concept in their work on psychical functioning, causality, temporality, etc. (Fain & Braunschweig, 1975; Fain, 1982; Green, 1982; Guillaumin, 1982; Faimberg, 1993, 1998; Neyraut, 1997). Several conferences and volumes of the French psychoanalytic journal ‘Revue française de psychanalyse’ have taken “L’après- coup” as their theme (see Revue Française de Psychanalyse 1982, 46, 3, “L’après-coup”; and, Revue Française de Psychanalyse 2006, 70, 3, ”L’après-coup revisité”). French psychoanalysis as a whole has no difficulty in referring to this concept, often limiting it to its temporal definitions. III. B. Nachträglichkeit in British and European Psychoanalysis In the continuation of the dynamic emergence – disappearance – return, it is useful to emphasize that the phenomenon of après-coup has become a shibboleth concept between French, British and American psychoanalysis. Admittedly Melanie Klein and her successors interested themselves more particularly in the first phase of the traumatic event and in the experiences of fright and terror which accompany it, thus in a situation of traumatic neurosis in which the process of après-coup no longer has any effect. If for French psychoanalysis the archaic element is constructed afterwards (A. Green, 1982), for the Anglo-American schools it is already there, and the psychic apparatus has to fight against the disorganising primitive feelings of anguish. The model of a commensal relationship (a kind of relationship in which two objects share a third in favor of the three) (Bion, 1970), and of a necessity to support development and accomplishment (by the way of a symbiotic relationship), play a much more dominant role than that of elaboration and working- through by frequenting the regressive path and by interpreting this negative attraction. As in the Kleinian model, it is necessary to fight against this regressive destructivity. This struggle is carried out thanks to creativity (Winnicott, (1989 [1963]), against a basic traumatic internal experience, the ‘fear of breakdown’ (Winnicott, 1970), or “nameless dread” (the parasitic relationship) (Bion, 1962). The relationship to pain and to masochistic functioning, to mourning and to the lost object , is dominated by regression to dependence and by the transformation of the responses of the family entourage. Attention is paid to the emotional experience between the analyst and the
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