Back to Table of Contents
Jay Greenberg (2015, personal communication with Eva Papiasvili) uses the French après-coup term because there is no adequate English translation. In his mind, the après-coup reminds us that whatever happens – in the consulting room or in life generally – has no fixed meaning and cannot be fully understood at any moment. Rather, meanings evolve and shift as the context within which events are experienced changes. He connects après-coup with Madeleine Baranger’s idea that everything is, at the same time, something else; adding the temporal dimension – everything is, has been, and will be something else. Working with this in mind deeply affects the understanding of clinical process; reminding one not to celebrate the “successful” interventions or to drown in the “mistakes,” because everything will evolve in ways that illuminate what has happened in unexpected ways. II. Fd. Nachträglichkeit – as an Essential Characteristic of Unconscious Functioning in General In this overview of the currents occurring in North American thinking about Nachträglichkeit can be seen a tendency to view it as characteristic of unconscious psychic functioning in general. However, different authors have honed in on separate aspects of this inherently complex phenomenon. One way to make sense of the multiple uses of the term is to consider the ‘Emma model’ (above) of an initial childhood sexual experience, which comes to have traumatic meaning only after puberty as a subset of a larger psychic capacity for the re- interpretation of memory, keeping in mind that it is not strictly speaking of a particular recollection which is changed at a later time but rather its meaning which in a new ‘blow’ is altered in a significant way. In the ‘incubation period’ between the two ‘events’, an unconscious and passive elaboration appears to take place, which produces a new understanding either blocking or facilitating further development. While Freud himself resorted to the ‘translational’ metaphor of re-inscription, at times this linguistic reference does not do justice to the radically modified intersubjective position which accompanies certain ‘re- categorizations’ of memory (such as can occur after the discovery of betrayal, transgression, or suicide). North American French-Canadian analysts also include the role of the Other in après-coup theorizing, mindful that the original tools for re-transcription are borrowed from early caretakers – the real others’. Consequently, the quality of interpsychic interaction available in the early environment can be an important, hidden, part of the historical reality of the original experience of trauma and the possibility of its re-transcription. III. Fe. Nachträglichkeit and Contemporary (Mostly North American) Interdisciplinary Studies If the differences between the fields of inquiry with their different methodologies are recognized and not confused, the interdisciplinary connections, applications, and cross- fertilization between psychoanalysis and other fields of inquiry can lead to fertile analogies and new hypotheses. Such was the method of Freud’s theorizing process. In order to continue his theoretical progress, he called upon other fields, such as science, anthropology, linguistic,
538
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online