IPA Inter-Regional Encyclopedic Dictionary of Psychoanalysis

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contents and processes; and a pre-cursor of the concept of developmental transformation, which, within the interplay of various editions of trauma and unconscious fantasy throughout life, includes the bi-directionality of regression and progression, the dialectics of the underlying force seeking symbolization as well as repression and repetition. In other strands of North American thinking, psychoanalysis itself can be viewed as the study of the Nachträglichkeit of early-life events, through multiple realities inherent in the psychoanalytic setting, which (re)construct symbolic bridges between the unassimilated traumatic events and their re-signification and transformation into representable experiences, process which can facilitate creation of qualitatively new subjectivities and expansion of meanings, spanning across generations. Overall, in the contemporary North American exposition, the two temporal vectors of Nachträglichkeit of deferment and retroactive re-transcription/re-signification are seen as complementary and as corresponding to dialectics of both (multi) deterministic as well as hermeneutic reconstructive and constructive psychoanalytic process. Among contemporary inter-disciplinary references, contemporary neuroscience emphasizes memory, in all its varied forms, as a living system that reconfigures itself through the medium of the psychoanalytic dialogue. In this reconfiguring operation, both neurobiology and psychoanalysis endorse the active dynamism and living character of memory . In this context relevant to Nachträglichkeit, psychopathology becomes a disturbance of reconfiguration of memory; and psychoanalysis fosters the construction and integration of new experiences and overturns the peremptory urge to repeat rigid and disturbed imprints that compromise the very structure of memory and integrity of the ego, and the dynamic fluidity of the overall psychic structure. In the entire world, many authors have shown and emphasizied the importance of the concept of Nachträglichkeit in the whole of Freud’s works (Eickhoff, 2006). B. Chervet remarked that Freud stopped to use the words Nachträglichkeit and nachträglich in 1917 with a few minor exceptions in favour of the two-stage process and the value of the psychic work into both realms of regressive and progressive ways. On both sides of the Atlantic, after a period of ‘concept latency’ and its Lacan’s subsequent retrieval, the Freudian Nachträglichkkeit underwent further elaboration, refinement and transformation of growing complexity. It has become one of the basic concepts of a theory of thinking including temporality, causality, memory, trauma, representations, affects, sexuality and erotogenic sensuality.