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setting and process, variously participating in creation of transference, countertransference, and enactments, verbal and non-verbal communications. Included in this definition of Nachträglichkeit is the view of multiple realities of transferences and those of the clinical setting: it is both real and illusory, both a repetition and creation; the past being active in the present and the present altering what has been past. Unassimilated trauma can be re-transcribed and, in this fashion, worked through. Writing on the “Psychoanalytic Setting as Container of Multiple Levels of Reality”, Modell concludes, (1989) “It is healing to experience past trauma in the new context of the safety of the current object tie to the analyst. But the paradox is that the analyst also represents simultaneously several levels of reality: the dangers of the past as well as the safety of the present…” (p.85). The concept of Nachträglichkeit implies a cyclical view of time and memory, and their affective re-contextualization of memories and time. The traumatically frozen time can be connected with the frozen metaphoric symbolization function, both linked with affective meaning (Modell, 1995, 1997). Affective re-contextualizations of memories can open the previously foreclosed metaphoric process itself, leading to broadened paths of creative adjustments (Modell, 2008). III. Fb. Developmental Transformation of Trauma The developmental-trauma angle was emphasized by Harold Blum (1996), who, examining the concept from a perspective of seduction trauma, the complementarity of memory and fantasy, representation and pathogenic development, the modification of memory with life experiences and analytic experience, writes, “because of its relation to temporal and causal issues, I propose Nachträglichkeit … as an unrecognized precursor of the contemporary concept of developmental transformation” (p. 1155). Blum broadens the developmental perspective onto the full life span and the trauma aspect onto the full experiential continuum, underscoring the reciprocal influences of past and present, and memory and fantasy. He writes, “The developmental alteration … may be detrimental or beneficial, regressive or progressive. Transformations occur in different phases of development, and recapitulations are new editions rather than replications” (Blum, 1996, p. 1156; also Novick and Novick, 1994). Addressing specifically the Nachträglichkeit conceptualization in the Wolf Man, Blum (2011) writes: “Freud’s (1918) concept of ‘deferred action’ or ‘après coup’ might be best understood not as an experience first becoming traumatic at a later developmental phase, but as a transformation of the confluence, influence, and meanings of past and present trauma (Blum, 2008, 2009). The preoedipal trauma of the Wolf Man may have had as much or more of an influence on psychic structure and conflict than the later Oedipal trauma formulated in Freud’s pioneering, yet fanciful reconstruction…” (Blum, 2011, p. 609). Blum (1996) also contemplates an interaction of the developmentally determined Oedipal fantasy and the pre-oedipal trauma: “The Wolf Man’s dream fantasy, however, was presumed to transform an earlier nontraumatic preoedipal memory into a new trauma. Development here largely occurs in a fantasy world, isolated from the child’s life. The enduring psychic reality of the dream became more important than the actual past experience or its memory, ongoing developmental change, or current pathogenic
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