Après-coup i.e., Freud's Nachträglichkeit is a fundamental psychoanalytic idea organizing every one of four ideas i.e., the four mental cycles that underlie the establishment of Freud's reasoning: a) repression, b) the construction of the unconscious, c) the formation of infantile sexuality and, d) psychic trauma. Après-coup unearths its inception in Freud’s primordial psychoanalytic compositions, yet it was just 50 years prior that French psychoanalysts explicated, resuscitated, and reactivated the cogitation thus bringing it acknowledgement as a fundamental Freudian idea.
As the historical backdrop of après-coup is installed in the French perusing of Freud, therefore this post will attempt to deliver an exposition of the Lacanian use of the term après-coup.
Jacques Lacan (1901-1981)
Lacan's term après coup is the term utilized by French experts to decipher Freud's Nachträglichkeit (which the Standard Version renders 'conceded activity'). These terms allude to the way that, in the mind, present occasions influence previous occasions deduced. Since the past exists in the mind just as a bunch of recollections that are continually being revised and rethought in the light of present insight. What concerns psychoanalysis isn't simply the genuine past grouping of occasions in themselves. However, the way that these occasions exist now in memory and the way that the patient tends to report them. In this way when Lacan contends that the point of psychoanalytic treatment is 'the complete reconstitution of the subject’s history.
He clarifies that what he implies by the term 'history' isn't just a genuine arrangement of previous occasions, yet 'the present synthesis of the past’. Therefore, History isn't the past. History is the past to the extent that ‘it is historicised in the present’. Lacan additionally shows how the discourse is organized by retroaction; just when the final expression of the sentence is articulated do the underlying words procure their full significance.
Thus, the pregenital stages are not to be viewed as genuine events sequentially preceding the genital stage, yet as types of Interests that are projected retrospectively onto the past. Lacan additionally shows how the discourse is organized by retroaction; just when the final expression of the sentence is articulated do the underlying words procure their full significance.
In 1953, Jacques Lacan highlighted the word Nachträglich which he deciphered as après-coup comparable to temporality as well as psychosis. However, it was not until the 1960s that Jean Laplanche (1924-2012) and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis (1924-2013), working as a team noticed the essentiality of Nachträglichkeit for Freud's speculations of sexuality and repression.
Jean Laplanche (1924-2012)
In Laplanche’s monologue (2016) he wrote:
“
Après-coup is a phenomenon that is not played out within the individual, within the intrapersonal, but rather within the interpersonal domain. Its specificity and its ability to reverse the “arrow of time” depends on this idea and this idea alone. In an individual, après-coup does not principally depend on the successive stages of the person’s life. It depends, first of all, on the simultaneous presence of an adult and an ‘infans’ (a pre-verbal child). The adult’s enigmatic message (which itself is inhabited by the adult’s own unconscious) constitutes the “Avant-coup” of this process that introduces, within the receiver of the message, the ‘infans’, an initial disequilibrium. Then, in a second moment, in the après-coup, the enigmatic message drives the ‘infans’ to translate, a translation that is necessarily imperfect. Such an ‘avant-coup’ is characteristic of the earliest concrete, practical messages transmitted to the child by the adult in the unavoidable frame of the “fundamental anthropological situation. "
(p. 171)
Jean Laplanche proceeded with that hypothetical work, finishing in his seminal workshops of on après-coup and on Freud's speculations of sexuality. He set up après-coup as a key towards the psychological interaction that happens during the developmental attachment relationship i.e., the puzzling parts of adult interchanges which are inherently repressed by a child which later incites interpretations to further stay on an ongoing incitement to promote translations. “Translations” is an express component of both Freud's and Laplanche's comprehension of repression. Laplanche later investigated the significance of the idea past the space of psychoanalysis and after the mid-1990s, the idea bloomed in France, collecting inescapable interest and consideration.
Works Cited
Problématiques VI: L’après-coup (2006). Paris, PUF.
-Sanjana Singh|17/11/2021
Great article! Quick question-
A writer I follow wrote this:
"I have a couple of friends and acquaintances who are (or were) really into Lacan. They’re all exactly the same: highly-driven highly-charismatic people, alternating between eerily brilliant and totally incomprehensible, and always deeply misanthropic throughout. Teach fits this same mold. Does the personality type attract you to the theory? Does the theory produce the personality type? It’s a weird enough coincidence that it makes me want to learn more.
And: I have a running argument with one of these people. The argument is: I accuse him of becoming a cult leader, he denies it. During a recent spat, he said something like - “okay, I agree that lots of people are fascinated by me / attracted to me / tend to do whatever I want, in a way that doesn’t make sense under the normal rules, and that you couldn’t replicate even if you wanted to. You can judge me for it, or you can admit there’s a hole in your map, something that I understand and you don’t. If you want to understand it too, read Lacan.”"
What do you think might be going on here?