IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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On both sides of the English Channel, writers puzzled by this difference between the two currents of psychoanalytical thought, one including the after-effect while the other does without it, have attempted to reduce it and to interpret it. Haydee Faimberg (2005a,b; 2006) linked also the après-coup to the concepts of multi-directional psychic temporality and causality (Faimberg, 2006, 2013), and she enlarged this notion towards the anticipated ‘not yet known’ future and towards Winnicott’s ‘Fear of Breakdown’ (1963), about a trauma which had already happened in the past but which is anticipated in the future. Faimberg applied the broadened après-coup to analytic ‘listening to the listening’, where conflicts are re-signified through a link across three generations (1998; 2005a,b; 2013). Some British analysts (Birksted-Breen, 2003; Sodré, 2007, 2005; Perelberg, 2007) have stressed the complementarity of what they view as the long-time-span (LTS) of Freud’s original Nachträglichkeit, over a longer period of time; and short-time-span (STS) après-coup, moment by moment “micro changes” in the transference within each session. Finally, all these authors tried to made links between Winnicott’s notion of the fear of breakdown and the notion of après-coup in French psychoanalysis. This shows that this fear accompanies the inaugural regressive movement of the process of après-coup. In Italy also, for example Paola Marion (2011) emphasizes the fact that Nachträglichkeit is a mechanism which describes how the psyche proceeds and which regulates the treatment of psychoanalysis. In fact, exchanges, debates and studies take place and are published, showing that the link between the two currents is possible and that incompatibility results from simplification. Two facts may need to be considered. On the one hand, and this has been true since Freud, the phenomenon of après-coup is often active, and indeed recognised, without being named. On the other hand, the term après-coup is very frequently used by analysts in its current simplification as temporal displacement and anterograde reflexivity, not involving the attractions of the unconscious and the consequent work required to the same degree as the concept itself. Finally, all psychoanalytical studies can also be considered as after-effects of what motivated Freud’s own work. To be sure, by following him closely they develop, refine and give new meaning to his propositions. Furthermore, by facing up to aspects of reality that remained unexplored in Freud’s work, they enrich it and modify it in its fundamentals. A return to the conceptions of the traumatic source is then necessary to allow a new area of thought to emerge and be integrated with the previous work and to reorganize the whole. III. D. Nachträglichkeit in Latin American Psychoanalysis From a Latin American perspective, what Freud refers to as Nachträglichkeit is a conception of nonlinear, retroactive temporality, an interplay between ‘before’ and ‘after’. It is agreed that the concept of Nachträglichkeit is associated with what is known as the return to Freud’s writings. Despite the dominance of Kleinian thought in psychoanalysis in the Rio de

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