This notion is important to any understanding of the psychoanalytic conception of time. It implies a complex and reciprocal relationship between a significant event and its later reinvestment with meaning, a rein-vestment that lends it a new psychic efficacy.

It was the French reading and translation of Freud that brought out the import of "nachträglich" and "Nachträglichkeit," terms which had not hitherto been consistently translated into either French or English.

The index of Freud's Gesammelte Werke has no entry for either nachträglich or Nachträglichkeit, and perusal of the indexes of the works of Freud's chief successors garners similarly negative results. It was Jacques Lacan who first drew attention to this notion, defining it in a precise if narrow way (1953, p. 48). Lacan did not consider the broader implications of the concept of Nachträglichkeit in Freud's work,...