Freud called upon the notions of deferred action and of trauma to account for how time and causality are organized in a mental life that he conceived of as permeated by sexuality. He argued that an impression inconsequential on its face but unintegrated into the flow of life by reason of its sexual character left mnemic traces that could be reactivated by later events in the history of the individual. Only then, retroactively, would it acquire a meaning capable of affecting psychic organization.

In his earliest thinking, Freud observed that certain childhood experiences left mnemic traces of an active albeit unconscious nature. These operated like internal "foreign bodies," and getting rid of them required that they be made conscious and "abreacted" (discharged by being revealed to the analyst). Such traces were always related to a seduction in early childhood that had not been fully comprehended at the time.

Freud quickly...