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Modell’s revival of Nachträglichkeit comes in the wake of his friend and Nobel Laureate Gerald Edelman’s independent discovery of a similar biological mechanism in the brain, of the continuous re-contextualization or reconfiguration of neural maps, within Edelman’s Theory of selection of neural groups (TSNG), redolent of Freud’s model described in the “Draft G” of December 1894. Obviously, it is possible to find an analogical link between the two realms. Modell’s understanding of the concept and its firm connection with memory goes back to the beginnings of the formulation of the ‘seduction’ theory. “Freud and Breuer (1893-95) observed”, Modell (1994) writes, “that the affective memory of trauma was lodged in the psyche like a foreign body which continued its agency long after the traumatic event” (Modell, 1994, p. 92). It was in this paper that Freud and Breuer wrote, “Hysterics suffer mainly from reminiscences” (Freud and Breuer, 1893-95, p.7). Freud, three years later, developed a more sophisticated theory of the re-contextualization of memories (Modell, 1990). Modell, who offers a more accurate English translation of Nachträglichkeit - subsequentiality – recognizes its awkwardness and continues to use Freud’s German term Nachträglichkeit. He notes that Freud maintained his conviction of the primacy of memory in the therapeutic process long after he gave up his seduction theory of hysteria, and recounts Freud’s 1914 paper “Remembering, repeating and working through”, where Freud re-states that one aim of psychoanalysis is “to fill in gaps in memory …” (Modell, 1994, p.92). Connecting development and psychopathology to Nachträglichkeit, Modell (1994), in his paper “Memory and Psychoanalytic cure” circles back to Freud’s original use of the concept, where Freud saw psychopathology as resulting from an interference with the process of re-transcription of memory. Freud described this as a failure of translation of the memory, which was his original understanding of the mechanism of repression (and the etiology of hysteria). Model makes a ‘developmental’ conjecture that later, after the formulation of Oedipus complex and psychosexual stages of development, Freud viewed the stages of psychological development as analogous to different languages and that experiences held in memory are repeatedly re-transcribed, retranslated and re-contextualized by subsequent development(s). According to Modell’s understanding of Nachträglichkeit, the memory of a traumatic event in childhood occurring at age x, is modified when that child enters age y and again is modified at age z, and so forth. Freud’s timeless insight was that memory is continually modified by subsequent experience, that “the past changes the present and the present can also modify the past and change our expectations regarding the future” (Modell, 1994, p.92). Modell (1994) linked the re-categorization of affectively charged memories, activated within the transference with the resultant expansion of meanings. Within this context, the pathological outcome of traumatic experience may be understood as a lack of ability to generate new meanings. The expansion of meaning in turn depends on free access to old memories that can be re-categorized by means of current perceptions. The paradox implicit in Nachträglichkeit also supports the notion of multiple psychic processes and multiple subjective realities, inherent in the early and later developments, in reciprocal regressions and progressions; and inherent in the dialectics of the illusory, actual and real within the clinical
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