'In one sense, Freud's theory of deferred action can be simply stated: memory is reprinted, so to speak, in accordance with later experience'[1]. It was, in other words, a 'mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events...Nactraglichkeit, translated as deferred action, retroaction, apres-coup, afterwardness'[2].
History of the term
editThe term appeared very early in Freud's thought: as he wrote in the unfinished "A Project for a Scientific Psychology" of 1895, 'a memory is repressed which has only become a trauma after the event'[3]. Publicly, the 'theory of deferred action had already been put forward by Freud in the Studies on Hysteria (1895)'[4], and it featured prominently in his 1918 study of the "Wolf Man". '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'[5].
It has been suggested that it was Lacan who brought the term back from obscurity after Freud's death, and certainly French psychoanalysis has since taken the lead in its explication. He himself claimed in his Seminar that 'the real implication of the nachtraglich, for example, has been ignored, though it was there all the time and had only to be picked up'[6], while writing in Ecrits of '"Deferred action" (Nachtrag), to rescue another of these terms from the facility into which they have since fallen...they were unheard of at that time'[7].
The Workings of Deferred Action
editThere is something counter-intuitive about '"Nachtraglichkeit" - a form of "deferred action" in which precipitating causes are activated after the event...an incomprehensible event becomes "traumatic" as a result of a second event which recreates the earlier event'[8].
Deferred Obedience
editClosely related for Freud to deferred action was deferred obedience, as in the different phases of a man's infantile attitude to his father: 'As long as his father was alive it showed itself in unmitigated rebelliousness and open discord, but immediately after his death it took the form of a neurosis based on abject submission and deferred obedience to him'[9].
In Totem and Taboo he generalised the principle and 'depicted the social contract also as based on posthumous obedience to the father's authority'[10], offset on occasional Carnival-like licence such as 'the memorial festival of the totem meal, in which the restrictions of deferred obedience no longer held'[11].
See also
editJean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis (New York 1973)
References
edit- ^ Adam Phillips, On Flirtation (London 1994) p. 33
- ^ Teresa de Lauretis, Freud's Drive: Psychoanalysis, Literature and Film (Basingstoke 2008) p. 118
- ^ Quoted in Jean Laplanche, Life and Death in Psychoanalysis (London 1976) p. 41
- ^ Sigmund Freud, Case Histories II (London 1991) p. 278n
- ^ Jean Laplanche and J.-B.Pontalis, in Phillips, Flirtation p. 33
- ^ Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (London 1994) p. 216
- ^ Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (London 1996) p. 281
- ^ Ian Parker, Japan in Analysis (Basingstoke 2008) p. 152n and p. 32
- ^ Freud, Histories II p. 191
- ^ Jose Bruner, Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis (2001) p. 161
- ^ Julia Kristeva/Jeanine Herman, The Sense and Non-Sense of Revolt (Columbia 2001) p. 13