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consciousness, displaced and distorted by forces opposing their becoming conscious. The seduction theory was essentially a theory of pathogenic pre-adult sexual trauma, as a sole determinant of later psychopathology. The childhood traumatic experience may have been forgotten, dissociated, or repressed, only to be reactivated or to exert a deferred traumatic effect in adolescence, after puberty. An enduring legacy of the dynamic aspect of the unconscious was the notion of forces paired in dynamic opposition, resulting in new psychic formations. During 1893-1895, Freud spoke of the opposition between the affects associated with traumatic events and the moral prohibitions of the society. As Freud proceeded with his self-analysis, during 1895-1900, he came to see the opposing forces as increasingly more internal: during this time, the construction of his initial conception of the mental apparatus, organized by two forces paired in dynamic opposition, the unconscious wish and the reality oriented prohibition, was underway. During this era, when the theory of the unconscious was not yet systematized, Freud was struck by the idea that psychic material was subjected from time to time to a rearrangement , a transcription . In his private correspondence to Wilhelm Fliess dated December 6, 1896, Freud (1892-1899) tells Fliess that he is working on the assumption that the “ psychical mechanism ” occurs in the form of memory traces . These are subjected to a process of stratification, rearranged in accordance to perception, and the memory traces become further subjected to transcription. What is being postulated here is that a transcription of scenes heard and seen but not yet properly understood continuously takes place in the psychic apparatus. This is the first indication of the concept of Nachträglichkeit . In the never published during his lifetime draft of the Project (1895) , Freud explained hysteria in terms of Nachträglichkeit : “…a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma by deferred action [Nachträglichkeit]” (Freud, 1895, p.365). Seen in this light, the unconscious contains distorted memory-traces of scenes from earliest childhood, which have been impossible to translate because the child has not yet mastered language or because at the time these scenes have been impossible for the child to understand. As a consequence, they have the quality of unsymbolized “ things ”. This initial causal mechanism of the unconscious receded to the background when, in the next stage of theory development, Freud emphasized fantasy in place of pre-adult seduction trauma/scene as a sole determinant of later psychopathology (Freud, 1892-1899, Letter of September 21, 1897, p. 260). The idea of recollections as internal foreign bodies acting as inner attack was overshadowed by the idea of fantasy which gradually became the cornerstone of what Freud called psychical reality, although not without subsequent repeated questioning of the relative importance of ‘ sexual trauma ’ vs ‘ fantasy ’. The realization of the importance of fantasy in mental events opened the door to the discovery of infantile sexuality and of the universal fantasy of the Oedipus complex , which is described in the ensuing letter of October 15, 1897: “One single thought of general value has been revealed to me. I have found, in my own case too, falling in love with the mother and jealousy of the father, and I now regard it as a universal event of early childhood… If that is so, we can understand the riveting power of Oedipus Rex … the Greek legend seizes on a compulsion which everyone recognizes because he feels its existence within himself. Each member of the audience was once, in germ and in phantasy, just such an Oedipus and each one recoils in horror from the
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