In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, afterwardsness (German: Nachträglichkeit) is a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events.
[1] As summarized by another scholar, 'In one sense, Freud's theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience'.
[3] However the 'theory of deferred action had already been [publicly] put forward by Freud in the Studies on Hysteria (1895)',[4] and in a paper of 1898 'he elaborates on the idea of deferred action: the pathogenic effect of a traumatic event occurring in childhood... [manifesting] retrospectively when the child reaches a subsequent phase of sexual development'.
[6] 'Thus although he never offered a definition, much less a general theory, of the notion of deferred action, it was indisputably looked on by Freud as part of his conceptual equipment'.
[11][12] "Afterwardsness" becomes the key concept in Laplanche's "theory of the general seduction" (théorie de la séduction généralisée) and of the corresponding importance of 'the act of psychic translation... of [enigmatic] deposits by the other'[13]—an approach which develops further Freud's letter 52/112 (to Wilhelm Fliess).