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event of infantile sexuality, in early relation to an elementary regressive quality of the drives, remaining silent for a long time, only to find expression at a later second stage. If the second stage is qualified as traumatic, it is revealed afterwards that the first silent one was the real traumatic event time. The history of the concept itself follows a similar process in two stages as it describes. In Europe, French psychoanalysis was in the forefront of the concept’s revival. Lacan coined the term après-coup to emphasize that the operation of après-coup is never over; that it draws towards an after-effect. It reveals a temporal structure of a much higher order than “retroaction”; and importantly, the “after” awaits until the” before” shall have assumed its rightful place. Contemporary French analytic authors further refine and retain the spiral circular dynamic of emergence-disappearance-return as core dynamic formulation of constructive aspects of psychoanalytic processes. Most of them paid a particular attention to the work realized by the process of après-coup on the traumatic regressive economy of the drives, and to its goal concerning the elaboration of desire, thought, and the whole mental functioning. Actually, this concept refers to the process engaged in all the modalities of psychic elaboration, as it is principally involved in the whole installation of erotic life and thought itself. In contrast to French psychoanalysis, where archaic elements and primal repression are constructed against regressive attraction , for contemporary British object relation theorists, following Klein and Bion the primitive anguish is already there . Within the context of contemporary British authors then, it is the work of psychoanalysis to combat and transform such fragmentary and disorganizing feelings of terror. Overall, in Europe, there is a notion that all psychoanalytical studies can also be considered as after-effects of what motivated Freud’s own work, giving new meaning to his propositions, and developing previously under-theorized and unexplored aspects of psychoanalytic theory in Freud’s work, enriching and modifying it in its fundamentals. From a Latin American perspective, without losing sight of the indisputable relevance of the two cases generally regarded as paradigms when it comes to attempting to pinpoint the problem of Nachträglichkeit in Freud’s writings: “Project for a Scientific Psychology” and “Wolf Man”, the concept is present in Freud’s writings in a reiterated, continuous and on occasion surreptitious manner. The persistence of Nachträglichkeit should not be overlooked, as the concept is a code to the unique temporality of the unconscious. The notion of Nachträglichkeit is a central element in the Freudian conceptual building, a mark related to the temporality associated with the laws of the primary process, causality, the logic of the unconscious, sexuality, repression, and repetition. As an operation of temporality, and as a means of constructing significance, Nachträglichkeit may not appear in an explicit manner and yet be present where repression occurs, and signify a memory where a memory becomes a trauma. In North America, Nachträglichkeit is seen by many as the birth of the developmental model in psychoanalysis which, in a complex manner includes the nonlinearity of unconscious
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