retroactive causality – Touching the Real

The time of Nachträglichkeit

One of the most peculiar aspects of Nachträglichkeit is that it appears to violate the basic laws of causality. In other words, rather than traumatic past events ‘causing’ trauma symptoms in the present, the memory of such events appears to construct the trauma retroactively. It should be said at this …

In search of lost time

The concept of Nachträglichkeit is probably one of the most misunderstood of a long list of Freud’s misunderstood concepts, not helped by Strachey’s mistranslation of the German word as ‘deferred action’. At the same time I would argue that it is probably one of Freud’s most radical ideas, and perhaps …