A little piece about the land of after

Freud called it Nachträglichkeit. He never fully developed the concept despite having coined the term, with the result that its translations remain unsettled. Yet for those of us interested in memory, most especially memory and narrative (whether memoir, nonfiction, or fiction) – and certainly all narrative has something to do with memory - Nachträglichkeit offers a compelling set of ideas.

In French, Lacan brought the term back as après-coup. In English, we know it variously as afterwardsness, deferred action, retranscription, or more simply as something understood later. It has to do with how we remember particular moments or events in the past - from one time in our life to other times. It has to do with the fact that the remembering person presents different needs at different times. And so, there is an inherent instability to memory that is not about accuracy or whether we have a ‘good memory’. It is about the life circumstances in which we do the remembering. So immediately, you can see how this lends itself to questions concerning narrative. Once upon a time becomes many upon a time.

In a letter to Wilhelm Fliess, Freud wrote that memory is “subjected from time to time to a rearrangement in accordance with fresh circumstances – to a retranscription. Thus, what is essentially new about my theory is the thesis that memory is present not once but several times over…” (1896)

Freud, as we know, was concerned with questions relating to trauma, and his applications of Nachträglichkeit can be seen perhaps most clearly in the case studies of Emma, described in Project for a Scientific Psychology (1895) and From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (1918), better known as the case of the Wolf Man. (For a brief illustrated account of this case, see the Freud Museum’s page on The Wolf Man’s Dream.)  

In these and other cases, Freud examines the idea of an initial (traumatic) event occurring in early childhood that returns to disturb his patient in dreams, fears, phobias, or subsequent incidents which may connect (however loosely) to the original trauma. If we accept that a very young child lacks the words and cognitive development to represent such experiences, then it can only be through later re-workings of memory that she may gain an understanding of the trauma itself. Linda Williams put it more clearly:

“The child sees or hears something, but the material is itself only gradually inserted into a narrative or a coherent picture as it is actively reworked in memory – a reinterpretation and reinscription of the scene, taking place over time in the development of the person.” (Williams, cited in Nicola King, Memory, Narrative, Identity: Remembering the Self, 2000)

And it is the fact of this being a later return to the experience or more likely, many later returns (throughout life and/or in analysis) that will alter it over the course of time. In other words, the memory will be re-transcribed. Modified in subtle or unsubtle ways at each re-remembering, with implications for the person’s sense of self and identity. At each instance of remembering, past and present are brought into an interaction. But each new present will be different from the previous ones, which are now part of the layered past. Each new present adds the “fresh circumstances” Freud refers to in his letter to Fliess.

But my concern is about narrative and storytelling. Let’s recall that Freud did not confine his insights to his professional treatment of trauma. He applied them to the regular workings of both memory and forgetting, and to the constitution of identity. There are at least two key passages in which we see this:

“We must above all bear in mind that people’s ‘childhood memories’ are only consolidated at a later period… and that this involves a complicated process of remodelling, analogous in every way to the process by which a nation constructs legends about its own history.” (Freud, Notes upon a case of obsessional neurosis -the Rat Man, 1909)

And the moving passage with which he closes his essay on Screen Memories (and which I have cited many times):

“It may indeed be questioned whether we have any memories at all from our childhood: memories relating to our childhood may be all that we possess. Our childhood memories show us our earliest years not as they were but as they appeared at the later periods when the memories were aroused. In these periods of arousal, the childhood memories did not, as people are accustomed to say, emerge; they were formed at that time. And a number of motives, with no concern for historical accuracy, had a part in forming them, as well as in the selection of the memories themselves.” (Freud, Screen Memories, 1899)

It is not surprising that these passages move us to think about memory as narrative, and more especially, our own life narratives. The stories we tell ourselves about our pasts. Our always unfinished quest to answer the question, who am I? How did I become me? How can I understand my past in order to help shape my future?

Jean Laplanche (psychoanalyst and translator of Freud into French) described the potential inherent to Nachträglichkeit, the après-coup, as follows:

“…the human being reaches towards a future only because he is auto-theorising and auto-translating: each important circumstance of his life is… for him the occasion to call into question the present translation, to detranslate it by turning towards the past and to attempt a better translation of this past, a more comprehensive translation, with renewed possibilities… this reworking takes place through the afterwards effect (dans l’après-coup). (Laplanche, Seduction, Translation and the Drives, ICA Documents, 1992)

In a fascinating critique of LaPlanche (and drawing on Lacan’s handling of the term), Sergio Benvenuto (psychoanalyst and philosopher) further investigates the ways in which our present rememberings impact the thing remembered, the past. He argues that the après-coup does not alter the reality of the earlier event, but that the force of that event is modified. Remembering may make the earlier event the cause of later outcomes, even though there was nothing provably causal about it:

“… après-coup is a special case of sense because it produces a cause: it’s not the sense of an event that is directly causal, but it works so as to make an earlier event, with a different sense, take on causal power. It is not the past itself that’s modified, but its power… the cause does not come before but after, through projection into the past.”

Benvenuto also wants to remind us that he, like Popper and Lacan, does not consider psychoanalysis to be a science. I would add that we can look now to neuroscience for additional, and equally helpful explanations of human memory. But Freud gives us something persistently valuable. A description of ourselves as remembering beings. A way to think about ourselves historically. To read the effects of the past on the present, but equally, the effects of the present on the past. Indeed, Benvenuto suggests that psychoanalysis might be seen as a “kind of historiography… based on historical reconstructions.” Is memory, in part then, a series of reconstructions of the self? A constant Nachträglichkeit? A series of afters after the afters? What Benevenuto describes as the après-coup, après-coup.

There is no sure answer. This, of course, is the other gift Freud gives us. Tantalizing uncertainty about ourselves that keeps us alive and wondering. If Freud’s ideas – in this case about memory - continue to speak to our culture, it is not because they are proven but rather because, as Benvenuto goes on to claim, they are “like the Castle of the Pyrenees, we can feel comfortable inside it even though we know it’s hanging in the void.” (Language and Psychoanalysis, 2018)

And because we must tell our stories from the land of after.