ABSTRACT
This chapter will argue that après-coup, Freud’s Nachträglichkeit, is an essential psychoanalytic concept structuring each of four concepts, four mental processes that lie at the foundation of Freud’s thinking: psychic trauma, repression, the creation of the unconscious, and the creation of infantile sexuality. It is argued that infantile sexual drives, in contrast to the self-preservative instincts, arise from a two-step process of translation and repression in which the residues of failed translation become source-objects of the drives. These residues of failed translation have an associative resonance with adult sexuality, and the child is driven to ongoing attempts to translate them, to make them meaningful après-coup. Thus, après-coup is at the heart of the human subject as a sexual creature who requires, desires, and creates meaning.
In the commentary, it is shown how the workings of the après-coup can help move us beyond the notion that implantations and intromissions belong to a stable conceptual grid with clearly delineated borders, and to see that these borders can become porous and even earn their coherence from their historical situatedness. More specifically, the concept après-coup enables us to examine how certain experiences can be re-inscribed, with changing sociopolitical conditions, and rendered traumatic. This is illustrated through textual translations of The Odyssey, through examples from the #MeToo movement, and through clinical vignettes drawn from the author’s practice.
