Afterwardsness

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. Nachträglichkeit, is also translated as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup, afterwardsness".^[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'.^[2]