IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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experience” (p. 1154). The interaction of the trauma and unconscious fantasy throughout early development until young adulthood was investigated and elaborated on in the longitudinal clinical studies of children who were re-analyzed as adolescents and young adults (Papiasvili and Blum, 2014, 2015). On several occasions, the traumatic events, reported by a parent, were not remembered, but enacted in play therapy with the puppets, then drawings at the end of child analysis; and subsequently symbolized in nightmares and dreams, and enacted in transference at age 19-21 years old. When the dream-nightmare and transferential enactment were analyzed, the re-signification of the event and its historization was made possible, although the event itself was not remembered. The complexity of the manner as to how Nachträglichkeit mediated between events and experiences came to a full exposition in the clinical work, where it was illustrated how events became experiences and took on a traumatic meaning, not so much at the moment when they happened, but in the memories and in their reconstruction after a certain delay. The primary referents of reconstructions were found in prehistoric traces left in the absence of any psychic representative proper. Psychically, these traces did not have a meaning; to take on a meaning, they had to be situated in the context of a narration that always came after the fact. The findings concurred with Gerhard Dahl’s statement, “Nachträglichkeit manifestly entails the action of a force, analogous to that of the compulsion to repeat, that seeks to symbolize the unfamiliarity and confusion of the original experience — whether as a real event that was not understood or as a diffuse primary-process scene — so that it can subsequently [nachträglich], in accordance with the reality principle, be structured, thought, understood, and perhaps also mastered” (Dahl, 2010, p. 740). In a comprehensive review of transcultural literature, Joann K. Turo (2013) emphasized two time vectors of the Freudian Nachträglichkeit – the deferment and retroactive revision. In her view, the therapeutic action of psychoanalysis, as differentiated from psychotherapies, lies “in the psychoanalytic process of converting traumatic memories in the repetition of the transference from unassimilated to assimilated through interpretation resulting in retroactive revision to new perspective, new experience, and new meaning, especially notable in the working through phase of the process” (Turo, 2013, p. 2). III. Fc. Intersubjective and Relational Perspectives: Nonlinearity and the Unexpected The Intersubjectivist and Relational views highlight the nonlinearity, fluidity and the unexpected character of the clinical dialogue and dialogues across history, in their thinking about Nachträgichkeit. Often regarded as Freud’s most nonlinear concept, Nachträglichkeit, in intersubjective perspective, anticipates the current valuation of multiple subjectivities and multiple temporalities involved in the analytic process. Adrienne Harris (2007) notes the role of Nachträglichkeit in shaping the clinical narrative, evocative of potential unconscious dialogues across history and time that arises in clinical work. She writes: “Past is not merely recovered but remade or made for the first time…” (Harris, 2007, p. 660).

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