1. Although Freud never gave the term any status as an independent concept, in general,Nachträglichkeitrefers to a relationship between a significant event and its subsequent or deferred (re)investment with meaning. Initially conceived as part of seduction theory (though it survives Freud's abandonment of it), the term marks the belated retrieval of an affective response to a traumatizing moment or a retrospective conferral of meaning on an earlier event that, in itself, may not have been particularly significant. Its importance to an understanding both of the symptomology of defense and of therapeutic response, an importance first developed by Lacan, has been most keenly mapped by Jean Laplanche. See, especially,“Notes on Afterwardness”(Essays on Otherness260–65) and, withJean-Bertrand Pontalis, his definition of“deferred action”(111–14).
2. Summarizing what she elsewhere refers to asFreud's notion of trauma's“temporal unlocatability”(Unclaimed Experience133n8),
3. Caruthargues somewhat more broadly that“the impact of the traumatic event lies precisely in its belatedness, in its refusal to be simply located, in its insistent appearance outside the boundaries of any single place or time”(Trauma9).
4. Although a full discussion of this topic—essentially, the very concept of psychical defense—is beyond the scope of this essay, asFreud's own thought developed, he came to recognize repression as just one type among a much wider spectrum of defense mechanisms—see, for example,Inhibitions, Symptoms, and Anxiety(Freud,Standard Edition20:114).