The International Journal of Psychoanalysis

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The sense of the past: Theoretical and clinical

aspects of deferred action

Steven Groarke

To cite this article: Steven Groarke (2021) The sense of the past: Theoretical and clinical
aspects of deferred action, The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 102:6, 1097-1115, DOI:
10.1080/00207578.2021.1878004

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2021.1878004

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INT J PSYCHOANAL
2021, VOL. 102, NO. 6, 1097–1115
https://doi.org/10.1080/00207578.2021.1878004

PSYCHOANALYTIC THEORY AND TECHNIQUE

The sense of the past: Theoretical and clinical aspects of

deferred action
Steven Groarke
Department of Social Sciences, Roehampton University, London, UK

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
Psychoanalysis has made a singular contribution to our Construction; conviction;
understanding of how we live with the past; most importantly, the memory; not-yet-conceived
concept of “deferred action” (it will become clear why I wish to object; reclamation; unlived
retain the English translation) challenges the association of experience
causality with a particular temporal direction, that is, the earlier-to-
later direction of causal efficacy. The purpose of this paper is to
explore the implications of “backwards causation” (as it were) based
on an application of the theory of object-use to the problem of
memory. I begin with some introductory comments on Winnicott’s
theory of object-use, before presenting clinical observations on a
patient’s emerging sense of the past. In the theoretical discussion
that follows, I consider the problem of memory in light of the
clinical example. A discussion of the continued importance of
“deferred action” is presented together with the introduction of the
concept of “reclamation” as a type of re-descriptive memory.

Introduction
Can we remember a past that has never been present? In this paper I aim to explore how
unlived experience may be reclaimed, retrospectively, through certain kinds of mnemic
action. To state my main thesis: the reclamation of the not-yet-experienced past depends
on the capacity of mnemic activity to re-describe reality. Re-descriptive memory, as I
shall call it, does not adhere to a simple opposition between “reality” and “fantasy”.
Rather, it presupposes “an experience of reality in which invention and discovery cease
being opposed and where creation and revelation coincide” (Ricoeur 1978, 246). My argu-
ment rests on an extended definition of “deferred action” (nur nachträglich), a definition
that encompasses not only the repressed contents of “a forgotten past” (Freud 1937b,
268), but also the unclaimed aspects of the not-yet-experienced past (Ogden 2014).
Freud provides the groundwork for the treatment of temporality in psychoanalysis. Yet
Freud’s hypotheses continue to remain viable only insofar as they are applicable to
“different categories of patients” and “various types of mental functioning” (Green 2005,
170). With this proviso in mind, my revised theory of “deferred action” draws on the
work of Winnicott, in particular (1) the theory of “object-use”, (2) the clinical meaning of
“a fear of breakdown”, and (3) the analysis of “the negative side of relationships”.

CONTACT Steven Groarke sgroarke2@gmail.com 45 Grosvenor Avenue, London, SW14 8BU, UK

© 2021 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any
medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.
1098 S. GROARKE

The theory of object-use, with reference to the problem of the past

My paper aims to build on Freud from an object-relations perspective. I contend that
where experience, originating in the negativity of traumatic states, is consequently
inscribed but not represented psychically, memory becomes a work of reclamation. The
latter may be understood as the “equivalent of the lifting of repression” in the psycho-
neuroses. In constituting that which it depicts, reclamation “gathers” the original
unlived experience – that is, the historical event of infantile trauma – “into the past
tense”. Winnicott (1974, 107) allows us to situate the mnemic activity of reclamation clini-
cally, that is to say, as “a fear of a past event that has not yet been experienced”. In his late
work, he also provided the wherewithal for a general theory of meaning as use. The
notion of “object-use” was introduced alongside the paradox of the created/found
object. The findings set out in “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identification”
(1968) were based on the inability of schizoid and borderline patients to make use of the
analyst. There are many patients, Winnicott (1968, 94) argued, “who need us [as analysts]
to be able to give them a capacity to use us. This for them is the analytic task.” The prin-
cipal theses of Winnicott’s paper are these: (1) “to use an object the subject must have
developed a capacity to use an object” (1968, 89); and (2) “it is the destructive drive
that creates the quality of externality” (1968, 93).
Written towards the end of his life, I think the paper on object-use is Winnicott’s clear-
est statement of how it is that we have a meaningful world in the first place. I am propos-
ing to extend the concept of deferred action by linking these clinical findings to the
problem of memory. This raises the question of how to make use of the past as an experi-
ence. Winnicott’s theory of object-use is familiar. I shall simply summarize the main argu-
ments as a starting point for my discussion of re-descriptive memory.

1. The subject relates to the object subjectively; the object has a being that is entirely
dependent upon its being an object subjectively perceived. The object thus remains
a projective entity; it does not constitute part of the object-world, although it is no
less a datum of experience than the object objectively perceived.
2. The object qua object is always in the process of “being found”, which means being
placed outside the area of subjective phenomena. The capacity to place the object
“out in the world” – that is, outside the area of projection and omnipotent control –
is seen as constitutive of the sense of reality: “the subject is creating the object in
the sense of finding externality itself” (Winnicott 1968, 91). Finding and creating are
not opposed in the primary process of worldmaking. To the contrary, finding “extern-
ality itself” (making contact with reality) and the hermeneutical activity of worldmak-
ing may be seen as equiprimordially determined. Being thus incorporates “being
found” as a further elaboration in imaginative activity.
3. The innate destructive drive is described as a two-way process: the subject destroys
the object because it is placed “out in the world”; while at the same time, it is the
destruction of the object that places it in the object-world. As part of a positive evalu-
ation of human action, destructive aliveness and the constitution of reality are seen as
two sides of the same process, a process whereby “ruthlessness” becomes integrated
with the unconscious destruction of the libidinal object. In a revised view of Freudian
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1099

metapsychology, Winnicott proposed that the outside world is apprehended through

the workings of the destructive drive prior to experiences of frustration.
4. The object survives destruction by the subject. Winnicott (1968, 92) maintains that sur-
vival consists in “absence of the quality of retaliation”, which, in the context of the
mother–baby relationship, amounts to adaptation relative to need. The mother
gives herself even as she survives. The child, in turn, discovers that total destruction,
the unbridled aggressiveness of the impulsive act, does not mean total destruction.
The discovery is made on the grounds of “being found” and “having destroyed”.
5. The subject uses the object that has survived; use is conditional on “the actual survival
of cathected objects that are at the time in process of becoming destroyed because
real, becoming real because destroyed” (Winnicott 1968, 90). It is only where it
breaks into being, that is, under the pressure of life itself, that the (made/found)
object can be used as a source of “other-than-me substance”. The use of the object
– precisely, as a living substance – marks a further imaginative elaboration in the for-
mation of psyche.
6. Finally, against the “unconscious backdrop” of destructiveness and the object’s survi-
val of destruction, the subject relates to the object as an objectively perceived object.
The object-world is now within reach not only through “love of a real object” (the
mother as a whole object), but also as the love of reality itself, the love of everything
that happens (amor fati). In this sense, the reach for meaning issues from the claim that
“ruthless love” makes on reality at the beginning of life.

Clinical example
The following observations are from the second year of a four-times-weekly analysis con-
ducted on the couch. The patient had been silent for several minutes when birds began
singing outside the window of my consulting room. I sensed the patient listening intently.
I had become attuned over the course of the treatment to the persecutory quality of the
patient’s listening, that is, the way she would sharpen her attention to my presence (see-
mingly hanging on every word), but also to the external setting and noises off. To begin
with, I worried that if I remained silent, she might find me too remote; and that given her
hypersensitivity, the silence might feel hurtful. My parental countertransference towards
the patient revealed itself, for instance, in a pulling away from the associational drift of my
thoughts towards something far more on edge and fussily involved.
Things felt different on this occasion. Transported by the sound of the birds, the patient
allowed herself (as she described it afterwards) to “drift back in time”. What was she doing
in those moments? Following the period of silence, the patient began telling me about
the summers that she had spent as a child in her grandparents’ country house. Typically,
she began recounting these details in a hesitant and restrained manner; the narrative was
recognizably stilted and discontinuous. I was familiar with this irritating stop–go approach
on the patient’s part, in which she seemed unable to grasp her own experience. I said
“You can hear the birds singing.” Following the interpretation, the patient continued
with greater fluency to say that, in many respects, her relationship with her maternal
grandmother “mirrored” her relationship with her mother. The analysis had been charac-
terized from the beginning by a disturbed and disturbing maternal transference,
1100 S. GROARKE

including the patient’s reaction to a perceived watchfulness in me that she experienced as

threatening. She was certain that I regarded her with contempt. Thus, the transference
revealed a mother that she experienced as an emotionally cold, fastidious woman, with
a “still face”; a mother who never “got down on the floor” and played with her as a
child. Unlike the animated watchfulness that mother and baby ordinarily experience in
getting to know one another, the patient described something altogether more lifeless.
She said on one occasion, “I don’t know my mother’s face” and admitted feeling “dis-
gusted” even by the thought of having to look at her mother’s face. And yet despite
the striking aspect of these phrases, the descriptions were presented in such a detached,
impersonal manner that I struggled to envisage the patient’s mother as anything other
than a one-dimensional figure. The same lack of depth characterized most of the
people she spoke about.
The precarious position that I occupied in the patient’s fantasy linked her feelings of
utter contempt for a “useless” mother to an unconscious set-up in which she felt
forced to accommodate herself to me. To begin with the patient could not tolerate the
slightest inaccuracy or oversight on my part, but would harbour a defensive attitude of
disdain towards me (a “useless” analyst) behind an elaborate display of politeness. It
was possible to put some of these anxieties into words. She described being afraid that
I would do something “nasty” to her; that I would “punish” her for some wrongdoing.
She reported approaching my front door in a state of “absolute dread”, afraid to knock
because of what she took to be my hostile attitude towards her. She convinced herself
that I found her insufferable.
These reactions seemed to me indicative of a longstanding catastrophic internal set-up
in which the patient felt her love was rejected, while at the same time, feeling exposed to
and humiliated by an ominously “still” or inscrutable object, an object incapable of
meeting her needs. The patient thus veered in the transference between compliance
and unconscious omnipotence. As well as a history of self-harm and eating disorders,
she was also assailed now with “panic attacks” between sessions, which often involved
delusional hypochondriacal fears about life-threatening illnesses. These fears, too, had
a history. For example, the patient believed that merely thinking about a miscarriage,
during the early weeks of her pregnancy, had actually helped bring it about. Sub-
sequently, having given birth to her first child, she was afraid that she would be unable
to keep the baby alive, convinced that her milk would poison him. She had in the
course of the analysis been able to talk about some of these anxieties, which helped
her get a better understanding of the unconscious impulse to “brace” herself against
attacks from a mother who she felt routinely “spat things back” at her, and who could
not be relied upon to keep her alive. As the associative sequence that I am describing
demonstrates, the gain in understanding was integral to the patient’s gradually relating
in less detached, more vital ways towards me.
The patient had not spoken to me before about her grandparents, and she went on
now to describe in some detail the garden where she used to play as a child. The
figure of her beloved grandfather came as something of a surprise, almost unrecognizable
to me from among the bleak, devitalized memories about her childhood. She was visibly
moved by these thoughts. The birdsong clearly meant something about something to the
patient. This is what I aimed to get at with my interpretation. There was no need for me to
say any more than I did; the metaphor of birdsong presented itself as fully alive. It was
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1101

important, however, for my interpretation to facilitate the patient’s more expansive use of
the past tense. In talking about the past, referring to something ostensibly remembered,
the patient was also discovering or creating something that she had never before experi-
enced. She could hear the birds singing now, and the confluence of fantasy and memory
was evident not only in what she said, but also in the affective modality of the transfer-
ence–countertransference. The fact that the patient was discovering something in the
very act of referring back came across above all in the ambiance of the session, in
which birdsong denoted both an existent mnemic object (“remembering that … ”) and
a transference construct. The act of remembering itself may be seen as indicative of a
changed capacity for relatedness in the here-and-now.
It would I think be a mistake to treat the birdsong as simply an external factor, and the
patient’s engagement with it as an evasion, or a turning away from psychic reality. The
patient’s libidinal investment in mnemic images was sufficiently stirred up on this
occasion to allow for the possibility of a terse but generative intervention. My interpret-
ation was not aimed at elucidation so much as an augmentation of past-tense utterance.
In the event it allowed the patient to speak more freely, to re-experience the sound as well
as the sense of birdsong, but also, more importantly, to make use of the birdsong in my
company as an experience. The patient’s affective communication, evident in her rapt lis-
tening and quiet tearfulness, was evoked by her “drifting back in time”, which, further to
the interpretation, was followed by more “talk about” the past. The interpretation, I
suggest, allowed for the introjection of a non-intrusive attentiveness, a quiet moment
in a more facilitative atmosphere.
The metaphor of birdsong exerts a pressure to do something with the past in the ana-
lytic situation. As such, I think the interpretation caught something of the patient’s mood,
affording her access to an enlarged field of associative thoughts. It seems to have caught
the “drift” of her dreamy state, including the literal referents in the patient’s childhood
memories. It was evident from what was said that she had an image of the garden in
mind. My interpretation was certainly aimed at her mnemic experience, but only
insofar as the latter represents a particular sense of the past at this moment. The analytic
encounter thus instantiates the transference into words of the acoustically perceptible
past, the remembered sound. The mnemic image straddles perception and its place in
language; it forges a link between the non-verbal shaping of experience, the infant’s pri-
mordial inscriptions of living-there, and the ideational content of psychic life. Moreover, I
think the use the patient was able to make of the birdsong shows that the “sense of the
past” is necessarily metaphorical; that our patients’ histories are always suspended, or at
one remove, in mnemic images.
Shortly afterwards the patient came to a session having discovered, among her private
papers, a letter from her mother. The letter contained an admission on the mother’s part
of some wrongdoing, as well as a plea to her teenage daughter for forgiveness. The
patient was profoundly shocked and bewildered by this discovery. She had no idea
what to make of it. The sentiments expressed in the letter were unrecognizable to the
patient as those of her mother; nor did she have any memory of the letter itself. Presented
with something that she felt had “never existed”, the patient could find no more to say
about the letter, although her bewilderment provided an indication of the missing
affect in her otherwise detached descriptions of an unavailable mother.
1102 S. GROARKE

The discovery of a mother she had not thought existed continued to unfold in a follow-
ing session, which began with the story of a dead mother. The patient’s young son had
come home from school with news that a child in his class had lost her mother some
years ago. The patient, for reasons that she could not explain, disbelieved her son. She
remained unnerved by her reaction and, eventually, decided to contact her son’s
teacher, who confirmed that what he had told his mother was indeed the case. Confir-
mation of the death left the patient incredulous: she simply could not believe the
child’s mother was dead and, once again, she was surprised by the intensity of her disbe-
lief. This was not an anomalous reaction, however. The patient’s disbelief was indicative of
an underlying situation in her treatment, where I found myself faced repeatedly with
something that was apparently “not there” – including not only the gaps in her stories,
but also the flat feeling evoked in me by the lifelessness of her accounts.
On this occasion, the patient’s reaction to an internal mother was discernible in her
expression of disbelief coupled with the letter she had not thought existed. I suggest
that the patient’s disbelief was overdetermined. I said that it was difficult for her to
believe in the death of a mother whom she felt had “never existed”. How could a
mother die without having really and truly existed? The patient was able to make some-
thing of this interpretation: the thought that she had been living all along with a “dead
mother” allowed the discovery of the letter, and its apparent non-existence, to take
another turn. She described feeling “disconnected” during a recent conversation with
her husband about their wish for a third child; she told me how she noticed herself listen-
ing to the conversation, as she put it, “looking in from the outside”. I have already men-
tioned that a paranoid state of watchfulness was often apparent in the maternal
transference. It was possible to interpret this now in relation to the conversation with
her husband. I said, “You experienced yourself inside a watchtower.” She agreed that
this was exactly how it had felt at the time, although, importantly, she was encouraged
by the fact that she had noticed what was happening as it meant being able to talk
about it with me.
The caveat reveals how much more was going on in the transference than the patient’s
watchfulness. In addition to a punishingly vigilant superego, the tower may also be seen
as a container capable of thinking about babies. The analyst who takes an interest in what
the patient has to tell him, is also the analyst about whom her erotic curiosity has become
less repressed (hidden away in the tower). I said that being able to tell me about the
experience was important for her, especially insofar as it provided a possible “way out”
of the watchtower. The following construction, which I presented to the patient,
afforded an intuitive grasp of this complex internal arrangement: “Like Rapunzel,
locked inside a tower, but with a small window from which to let down your hair.” I
had not made much of the fact until now that the patient did indeed have “magnificent
long hair, fine as spun gold”. I expect this seemingly unnoticed detailed played into the
Rapunzel reference. The patient in turn took up what I had said, making an immediate link
between the phallic imagery of the tower in the fairy tale and the conversation with her
husband about their wish for a third child. The link may be seen as a construct of the
Oedipal transference: being able to talk to me and to “tell me about it” embodied an
unconscious wish to let her hair down, enabling me, like her husband and (in the fairy
tale) the King’s son, to climb up and give her a baby.
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1103

Meanwhile the patient was sensible of her psychic deadness in a sequestered pre-
Oedipal situation with a mother who had “never existed” but was replaced (so to
speak) by her abductor. The use the patient was able to make of my reference to Rapunzel
suggests that the discovery of the letter had initiated a process of recovery, a process in
which the repressed surfaces as a primitive pre-Oedipal anxiety as well as an Oedipal wish.
The Oedipal and pre-Oedipal structures function in tandem here: the wish for the tower-
phallus provides a possible way out of the claustration of the sterile tower-breast; hence
Rapunzel’s vital judgement: “He will love me more than old Dame Gothel does.” The jud-
gement reveals the possibility of a new kind of loving relationship; a changed capacity for
relatedness; something which, locked away in a tower, the girl had never before experi-
enced. But the fairy tale also announces an unfounded mother–infant tie prior to the
abduction – that is, with the father’s exchange of the unborn infant for rampion. The sat-
isfaction of the mother’s narcissistic craving seals the infant’s destiny prior to her birth.
The scene of her unfoundedness forms part of the infant’s pre-history and, as such, is
not subject to recovery. Unfoundedness appears, in retrospect, not as a repressed trau-
matic memory but as a gap or psychical hole, a not-yet-conceived object.
Can we speak of the inscription of an unborn self that is lodged within the breakdown
of the mother–infant tie? The analysis of my patient supports this interpretation: following
the discovery of the letter, the patient returned from a weekend break thoroughly shaken
by a hallucinatory experience of never having been born. She had been about to board an
aircraft, and was making her way along the passenger boarding bridge, when she became
paralysed with anxiety. She was not afraid that she was going to die during the flight, but
rather, that she had never been born. She saw herself “trapped” at the outset in the birth
canal. She repeated the words “trapped” and “stuck” several times in describing her
experience of the bridge connecting the airport terminal gate to the aircraft as an unend-
ing interment. Furthermore, she was convinced that the anxiety did not really belong to
her. Something inside felt “alien” to the patient. I said, “You were experiencing something
that has never been born but has remained lodged somewhere inside you.”
The patient brought a dream some months later, which she herself linked to the board-
ing bridge hallucination and the interpretation of an interred unborn self. The link associ-
ated the dream with what I understood to be her psychic pre-history:
I was looking at myself giving birth to a baby that I didn’t recognize. It was neither of my two
children. I heard a voice telling me to turn the baby around so that its face could be seen. It
may have been my own voice that I heard telling me what to do. I eventually managed to turn
the baby around, revealing its long blonde hair. The voice said, “Oh, she is a baby.”

The patient expressed relief at being able to dream the “memory” of her birth, to
experience something for the first time, and to associate her feelings of catastrophic
anxiety – that is, the anxiety of never having been born – with the immemorial
past. I believe the dream shows the extent to which the patient had been able to
assimilate and make use of the analytic relationship, using the fantasy of the fecund
tower beyond the confines of a psychic retreat. In a series of unconscious thoughts
and associations extending over many sessions, starting with the metaphor of bird-
song, the patient was able to make use of my construction not only as a psychic rep-
resentation of a potent Oedipal object, but also as a more generative pre-Oedipal
“inside” capable of giving birth to the patient psychically.
1104 S. GROARKE

Discussion
Looked at from the point of view of object-use, we can see that the patient refers to a
series of mnemic objects, including: beloved memories relating to her childhood; a
letter that she had not thought existed, which may be understood as an unconscious
inscription of a mother who was experienced primarily in the negative (“not there”);
the death of a mother in which the patient could not believe; and the pre-history of an
unfounded mother–infant tie that emerged not only through the use the patient made
of my intuitive reference to Rapunzel in the transference–countertransference, but also
in the boarding bridge hallucination and the dream of the baby being born. I contend
that the mnemic sequence under discussion presupposes that a more satisfactory
object-relationship existed in the transference, that is to say, following a period of treat-
ment in which the “positive aspects” of the patient’s (“thin-skinned”) narcissism were
taken into account alongside the conflict with “destructive narcissistic” parts of herself
with which she was not identified (Rosenfeld 1987, 275).
My aim now is to outline an account of memory adequate to the layering of meaning
discernible in the patient’s emergent sense of the past, an account that credits the work-
ings of an irreducibly complex temporality in the transference. Let me begin with two basic
principles that Freud introduced in a letter to Fliess on 6 December 1896 (quoted in
Masson 1985, 207). First, the principle of inscription, or what Freud called the “process
of stratification” (Aufeinanderschichtung), denotes the “multiple determination” (mehr-
fache Determinierung) or “overdetermination” (Überdeterminierung) of the mnemic
object. The idea that memory is “laid down in various kinds of indications [Zeichen]” or
“registrations” (Niederschriften) allows us to posit the inscription of somatic sensation, per-
ception and affect at the beginning of life. This suggests that the pre-history of maternal
object failure is “laid down” for my patient not as an object of representation but, rather, as
a series of inchoate, fragmentary impressions that have yet to be experienced. The possi-
bility of providing psychic meaning, in retrospect, requires an active “rearrangement”
(Umschrift) of these “memory-traces” (Erinnerungsspuren); hence the second principle of
constitution. Importantly, the psychoanalysis of constitution privileges the “re-transcrip-
tion” (Umschrift) of backwards causation: the movement between (1) the literal referents
in memories “relating to” (Freud 1899, 322) the patient’s childhood; and (2) “talk about”
the past, that is, a past that “has never had a real existence” (Freud 1919, 185).
Freud combined inscription and constitution – that is, signs (Zeichen) and acts – under
the heading of “deferred action” (Nachträglichkeit), although he never formulated a
general theory of this activity and its elementary forms. The index of his Gesammelte
Werke contains a reference to neither nachträglich nor Nachträglichkeit – and yet both
terms appear frequently in his work. The translation of these terms bears directly on
my theme. In this respect, I propose that “deferred action” is a felicitous translation of
the German term. The emphasis in the French translation on “after the event” has
gained a wide currency in post-Freudian psychoanalysis. The bias in favour of “later
experience” represents a partial translation of Freud’s term, whereas the dimension of
“action” introduced by the English translation suggests to me a particularly clear-
minded decision on the part of the translator. The action frame of reference identifies acti-
vation as integral to the retrospective attribution of meaning. It places the Freudian
interpretation within a general theory of human action and, thereby, augments the
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1105

hermeneutic field (Ricoeur 1991). As such, Strachey’s translation draws attention to habits
of action (something I can do) operative within the reach for meaning. Moreover, the idea
of “deferred action” indicates the extent to which we are always operating in the area of
object-use.
Turning more specifically to the problem of memory, Freud’s notion of “recollection”
amounts to far more than a record of past events. For instance, the Rat Man’s recovery
of his memories of being beaten by his father exemplifies Freud’s (1909) retrospective-
prospective schema; the case history demonstrates the non-linear model of repression-
recollection. But matters become yet more complex when the problem of memory is
posed further to the model of repressed-retrievable memories. From the 1895 “Project”
through the archaeological model of the mature works to the late work in the 1930s,
the complexity comes to the fore through the different meanings assigned to the past
in Freudian metapsychology. Broadly speaking, as the theory of psycho-neurosis
assumed prominence (cf. the papers on metapsychology), at the same time the reach
for meaning was specified increasingly in terms of the search after memories. The archae-
ological imperative of bringing the past to light identifies the question of sense with the
economy of repression. This is a matter of historical record. In the theoretical and techni-
cal refinements of psychoanalytic treatment after 1910, the centrality of the archaeologi-
cal analogy was established clinically in terms of “transference” and the idea of
“transference neurosis”.
Despite Freud’s ongoing commitment to the archaeological model of repression-recol-
lection, the late works nonetheless open up a new line of inquiry. The radical import of the
late work is discernible, not least of all in the attempt to rethink the problem of memory
from the point of view of “conviction” (Überzeugung). The problem is redefined along
these lines in “Constructions in Analysis” (1937b), as well as key passages in “New Intro-
ductory Lectures” (1933). Preoccupied with the dilemma of “interminable analysis”
(unendliche Analyse), Freud (1937a, 1937b) effectively outlined a new theory of
meaning. The theory was designed to account for the resistance of the id; hence the
radical, albeit perturbing discovery of the late work. Faced with what he saw as the “con-
servatism” of the instincts, Freud posited “conviction” as an active conception of remem-
bering. The task of bringing the past to light pertains where repression comes about as a
result of psychic conflict. And yet, as Freud (1937b, 258–259) eventually admits, the quest
for memories is supplemented by the analyst’s task “to make out what has been forgotten
from the traces which it has left behind or, more correctly, to construct it”. Freud (1937b,
260) continued to insist that memories can be forgotten but not abolished; that what is
forgotten is always “present somehow and somewhere”. At the same time, he allowed
that there is more to the problem of memory than so many hidden meanings and their
recovery. On the one hand, the analyst brings about in the patient “an assured conviction
of the truth of the construction”, which, on the other hand, “achieves the same thera-
peutic result as a recaptured memory” (1937b, 266). As we shall see, the idea that con-
structions compel convictions as memories lies at the heart of Winnicott’s paper on the
“Fear of Breakdown”.
Psychoanalysis remains viable as a theory of libidinal investment only so long as the
sense of reality remains open to re-description, to the creation and recreation of
meaning in a backward as well as a forward direction. The coherence of retroactivity
and conviction shows how statements about the past have meaning in the Freudian
1106 S. GROARKE

interpretation. The notion of “trauma” plays a decisive role here. Freud (1950, 356) began
with the model of hysterical repression, the idea that a repressed memory only becomes
“traumatic” by “deferred action” (nur nachträglich). The structure of deferment was set out
initially in conjunction with the theory of seduction. Take the case of Emma in the
“Project”: Freud accounts for the patient’s phobia on the grounds that the child receives
an impression to which she reacts, but without taking the experience fully into her mind.
It is not the child’s unconscious fantasy, any more than the original event, that is traumatic
so much as the memory of the event. That Freud consolidated the link between construc-
tion and conviction in his later writings is the burden of my argument. Meanwhile, the
essential idea that traumatic after-effects necessitate the action of re-description – that
is, as a condition of sufficient meaning – is present in Freud from the late 1800s onwards.
The constructive-reconstructive horizon of intelligibility, the idea that “a different
understanding of what was remembered” (1950, 356) is available in retrospect, reorients
our clinical thinking. This is evident in the case history of the “Wolf Man”, where the obser-
vation of parental intercourse (the “primal scene”) makes sense only after the event. In this
case, Freud was intent on demonstrating (1) that neuroses in adult life are based on infan-
tile neuroses, and (2) that sexuality is the main aetiological factor. For Freud the very belat-
edness of trauma confirms the interpretation of castration anxiety, where the dream of a
four-year-old child was reported some 20-odd years later in the course of an adult analy-
sis. Freud (1918, 38) treats the dream as a deferred reactivation of the primal scene, a
“deferred revision” of “impressions” in want of meaning. It is clear from Freud’s (1918,
34) account that fragmentary impressions constitute the object of construction: “A real
occurrence – dating from a very early period – looking – immobility – sexual problems
– castration – his father – something terrible.”
Freud identified the onset of the Wolf Man’s illness with the repetition of the primal
scene in the dream, which means that trauma, in this case, may be seen as “another
instance of deferred action [nachträglich]” (1918, 45 n1; emphasis in the original). But
this still leaves the question of whether or not the scene actually took place: was the
scene witnessed by the 18-month-old child, or imagined as a retrospective fantasy (Zur-
ūckphantasien)? Freud (1914, 103 n1) counted this as the “most delicate question in the
whole domain of psychoanalysis”. It requires no less careful handling by us. Freud
(1918, 120 n1) admits that, in certain respects, it is “a matter of indifference … whether
we choose to regard [the view of parental intercourse] as a primal scene or as a primal
phantasy”. In fact, a radically new theory of meaning was construed on the grounds
that primal scenes “are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be
divined – constructed” (1914, 51). The analysis of the patient’s dream, according to
Freud, revealed the extent to which his childhood disturbance – including violent
temper tantrums, obsessional symptoms and phobia – came about through the identifi-
cation of more mature sexual feelings with the primal scene. For Freud (1918, 121 n1) the
patient retrospectively introduced a “fantasy” of his parents copulating into the scene that
he had witnessed at 18 months of age.
What did the patient himself make of all this? It seems he was convinced about the
reality of his recollections, regarding his seduction as a three-year-old by his precocious
six-year-old sister. Freud tells us that the patient accepted his seduction by his elder
sister as an “indisputable reality”. The same was not true, however, with regards to his
observation of his parents’ intercourse, about which he remained unconvinced. By
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1107

raising the question of believability, Freud introduced a new way of thinking about the act
of remembering. A complex semantic arrangement is postulated on the grounds that
certain conditions are required if the patient is to establish a sense of “conviction”
about the past and, thereby, reclaim the not-yet-conceived object. Freud’s approach in
this case was consistent with conclusions reached in an earlier paper, “Remembering,
Repeating, and Working-through” (1914, 149), where he identified states of mind in
which “something is ‘remembered’ which could never have been ‘forgotten’ because it
was never at any time noticed – was never conscious”.
Freud (1914, 149) acknowledged that the conditions of possibility pertaining in the
case of “conviction” are different from those required for “recollection”. First, in the
case of early childhood experiences, which cannot be understood at the time, “no
memory as a rule can be recovered”. Second, “the conviction which the patient obtains
in the course of his analysis”, therefore, is irreducible to recollection. Third, the patient
relies instead on “quasi-hallucinatory” images obtained from dreaming. Dream analysis
provides the model for mnemic activity. The patient has to “dream back”, as it were, some-
thing of the past that has never before been experienced. Accordingly, the sense of the
past rests on “memory” without recollection:
we can ascertain for ourselves that the patient, after his resistances have been overcome, no
longer invokes the absence of any memory of [early childhood experiences] (any sense of
familiarity with them) as a ground for refusing to accept them. (1914, 149)

Dreaming is conceived as “another kind of remembering” (1918, 51). In this respect, my

patient’s dream of a baby being born and her boarding bridge hallucination demonstrate
the extent to which “dream-memory” (Traumgedächtnis) provides access to the
unclaimed experiences of preverbal life. The patient’s material also pivots on the link
between believability and memory.
The idea that mnemic experience relies on fragmentary impressions, which, in retro-
spect, exert a pressure on the patient to make sense of the past, rests on a distinction
between truth-effects and truth-content. It requires a shift in our clinical thinking to con-
strue the sense of the past on the grounds of “quasi-hallucinatory” images. The argument
turns on Freud’s reference to “another kind of remembering”. Essentially, the idea of
“dreaming back” allows one to approach the problem of memory in terms of the “back-
ward direction” or “retrogressive movement” (Freud 1900–1901, 542–543) – that is, the
formally retrogressive trajectory towards non-verbal perception and non-representation
– characteristic of dreaming. To take Freud (1914, 51) at his word, mnemic experience
is “divined” between the recollection of historical truths and the construction of truth-
effects. To reclaim the underlying impressions of early trauma requires an imaginative
act of construction, as a result of which the “profound conviction of the reality” is
judged “in no respect inferior” to memories based on recollection.
The advances made in the case history of the “Wolf Man” anticipate an augmentation
of the Freudian interpretation, where the recollection of the past, based on a comprehen-
sive lifting of infantile amnesia, is supplemented by an alternative model of therapeutic
action. Freud eventually, if somewhat reluctantly, acknowledged the limits regarding
the lifting of infantile amnesia; in place of which he found more to say about “construc-
tion” as an essential aspect of the analytic encounter. Where attempts to grasp the unfor-
mulated impressions of past perceptions fail to cohere in sufficiently meaningful ways,
1108 S. GROARKE

Freud (1937b, 266) maintained that the analyst creates “an assured conviction of the truth
of the construction”. The problem of interminability required a reformulation of clinical
thinking. Thus, further to his initial account of the deferred action of a trauma, Freud
(1939, 74) went on to state that where traumas occur in early childhood, they are “not
accessible to memory”. Again, with respect to “the earliest impressions of our childhood”
(1900, 163–164), the traumatic situation may be re-described on the model of dream-
memoires, in which case conviction pertains to the potential meaning of fragmentary
impressions, perceptions and somatic sensations.
It is the immemorial past of early somatic experience (the patient’s pre-history),
coupled with primary object-cathexis, that animates our deepest convictions. Freud
(1987) effectively framed this fundamental insight in terms of a phylogenetic hypothesis,
indicating a type of pre-primitive affective a priori. The latter consists of “some sort of
hardly definable knowledge, something, as it were, preparatory to an understanding …
at work in the child at the time [of the primal scene]” (1918, 120). The inventiveness
that goes into making the past believable presupposes the existence of “a primitive
kind of mental activity”; directed toward the unrepresented sensory remains of the
past, and prior to the fixation of memories, our capacity to believe remains an essential
part of the reach for life. In short, the principle of inscription applies to the mnemic
object; the principle of constitution, to the mnemic act. As such, the act of remembering
extends to a past that has never been present. This accounts for my patient’s emergent
sense of the past as a construction of analysis. On the one hand, the object is experienced
as “not there” – for example, the letter the patient had not thought existed; the dead
mother; the pre-Oedipal claustrum of the sterile (“useless”) tower-breast; and the board-
ing bridge hallucination. On the other hand, a more responsive object is available to the
patient in my noticing what she notices: “You can hear the birds singing.” The interpret-
ation instantiates a vital object that is figured in the Oedipal wish for the tower-phallus
and the dream of the baby being born, but also in the unconscious associative links
between the fairy tale and the dream. In this case, the hermeneutics of action, broadly
defined, complements the psychoanalysis of mnemic signs and acts, precisely by
drawing attention to the constitutive link between semantic innovation and the use of
the past tense.
Let us now turn to the ways in which mnemic acts are related to their objects. Essen-
tially, acts are “directed upon” objects: in remembering, something is remembered.
Mnemic objects and the act of remembering are two sides of the same process; there
is no memory without an object remembered. Nevertheless, there are qualitatively
different ways of referring to the object. The situated act of remembering comprises
different types of reference to the mnemic object. Consequently, reference back, by
which I mean the present memory-judgement, produces a manifold sense of the past.
This description of objects, acts and situated meanings is consistent, to some extent,
with our ordinary way of operating with memory. Different uses of the past are evident
in the distinction that pertains in ordinary language between (1) the retention of a
bygone object, that is, something that has existed (or has already happened) but does
not exist any more (or is not happening now), and (2) the recovery of a lost object,
that is, something that has been “forgotten” but has now come back into conscious
awareness. The memories “relating to” my patient’s childhood, the summers she spent
in her grandparents’ country house, come under the heading of retention. On the
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1109

other hand, her attempts to grasp the meaning of a letter that she had not thought
existed may be seen partly as an act of recovery.
Recovery of the “forgotten” object characterizes the principal mnemic situation in the
classical Freudian interpretation. As such, Freud’s account accords with our ordinary use
of memory where all traces of the past event appear to have vanished only to return, typi-
cally, in symptomatic form. This is what Freud meant by the “return of the repressed” (Wie-
derkehr des Verdrängten). The idea that repressed memory can break through to the
surface presupposes a general topographical schema: (1) the “memory-trace” (Erinner-
ungsspur) registers impressions of the original event; (2) the “thing-presentation” (Ding-
vorstellung) reactivates and revitalizes the memory-trace; and (3) the conscious
“presentation” (Vorstellung) denotes a combination of the preverbal presentation of the
thing (essentially visual) with the “word-presentation” (Wortvorstellung) or verbal linguis-
tic symbol. Applied to past-tense utterances, this theory of meaning privileges the logic of
“return” characteristic of neurotic structures. In fact, Freud (1937b, 260) doubted that evi-
dence of the past is ever permanently destroyed, or that “any psychical structure can
really be the victim of total destruction … even things that seem completely forgotten
are present somehow and somewhere, and have merely been buried and made inaccess-
ible to the subject”. Accordingly, analysis engages the act of “forgetting” on the grounds
of presently available evidence (memory-traces), reinvesting our ordinary use of memory
through the permanent availability of past experience. Recovery, in other words, presup-
poses (a) that there was an original experience, and (b) that the experience was sufficiently
meaningful for it to be remembered.
Despite the fact that retention and recovery denote discrete object-usages of the past
tense, the “remembered past” and “return of the repressed” share a certain functional
value. In both cases, the sense of the past refers to “I remember that … ” The object
upon which the mnemic experience is directed remains replete with intelligible marks
of pastness. Consequently, mnemic experience is amendable to interpretation and com-
prehension. But can we remember a past that was never present? Does the characteristic
of “referring to some object” pertain to the not-yet-experienced? We could simply dismiss
the idea of “remembering a past that has never been present” as nonsensical. But my
patient’s reaction to the thought of her own non-existence (the fear of having never
been born) in conjunction with an absent, negative mother–infant bond, suggests that
memory admits a third type of action and concomitant object. My patient’s boarding
bridge hallucination demonstrates that alongside the retention of bygone objects and
the recovery of lost objects, the act of remembering consists in the discovery/creation
of not-yet-conceived objects. I propose the term “reclamation” for this type of activity.
The object of mnemic activity is open to different uses. Thus, further to our present
memories of past events, a past that has never before been experienced presupposes
mnemic acts that are directed toward not-yet-conceived objects. Reference back to the
non-yet-experienced past is a referential act, understood as a type of “calling back” or
“bringing about”. In this case, the mnemic act reclaims the possibility of memory itself,
the possibility of using the past tense to refer to something that has yet to be experi-
enced. My understanding of reclamation is based on two further propositions: (1)
memory re-describes reality, and (2) reference back brings about the past. Looked at
from the point of view of imaginative comprehension and the re-description of reality,
the problem is not what meanings our statements have, that is, what particular contents
1110 S. GROARKE

expressed by past-tense utterances mean, but rather, what it is for our statements to
mean what they do. In particular, the problem is how we grasp an event, which has
not yet been experienced, in the past tense.
There have been many notable contributions to this problem in contemporary psycho-
analysis. Winnicott is a case in point. The affective basis of unlived experience was central
to Winnicott’s (1974) late discovery of the “fear of breakdown”, and his findings allow us to
address the sense of the past as a clinical problem. The full import of the discovery,
however, is not clear in Winnicott’s formulation. In stating his main theme, Winnicott
(1974, 104; emphasis in the original) proposed that “clinical fear of breakdown is the
fear of a breakdown that has already been experienced”. Little (1990, 62), who was a
patient of Winnicott’s, bears witness to this interpretation of “memory in the future
tense” – “[Winnicott] told me that such fear of annihilation as I felt belonged to ‘annihil-
ation’ that had already happened”. It would appear that, based on her account of “annihil-
ation” as a peculiar and distinct state in the present, the patient was able to live something
that actually happened in the past. She claims to have “experienced” something as the
cause of her persecutory anxiety. Like Winnicott, Margaret Little refers to “reliving the
past experience”, which presupposes the retention of mnemic experience as a causal
factor in the re-enactment of early trauma.
There are inconsistent passages in Winnicott’s formulation of “memory in the future
tense”. As Ogden (2014, 55; emphasis in the original) points out, “Winnicott has mis-
stated his main theme. What I think he means … is that the fear of breakdown is a fear
of a breakdown that has already happened, but has not yet been experienced”. We shall
come back to what has and has not “happened”. Meanwhile, Ogden provides a character-
istically illuminating discussion of the “fear of breakdown”, emphasizing the analytic task
of “reclaiming” a life the full extent of which proved too much to bear in infancy and child-
hood. For Ogden the mnemic activity of reclamation is directed upon an “event” that, due
to the immaturity of the ego, was never fully experienced or symbolized. To restate the
Winnicottian paradox from Ogden’s point of view: the fear of happenings’ breaking
down is symptomatic of what has happened, namely, the not-yet-experienced break-
down in “the mother–infant tie”. Ogden’s commentary serves as a corrective to Winni-
cott’s original statement. At the same time, it draws attention to “the urgent need to
lay claim” (2014, 58) to more life in the name of reclamation. I have introduced the re-
descriptive nature of this activity.
Winnicott’s account of the negative aspect of object-relationships provides a frame-
work for the analysis of my patient’s attempt to grasp a maternal object that she felt
was “not there”. Advances in contemporary clinical thinking notwithstanding, I do
not think anyone has taken the psychoanalysis of the not-yet-conceived object
further than Winnicott did. His most influential paper, “Transitional Objects and Transi-
tional Phenomena”, provides a coherent theory of the negative dimension of the not-
yet-conceived along developmental and clinical lines (Green 1997). Experience is not
a given but relies for its integrity on certain conditions. The possibility of the infant’s
transition from “dependence” to “relative dependence” rests on the mother’s “special
capacity” in making allowances for the “illusion” that what the infant creates actually
exists; hence the “intermediary” status of the object, between inner and external
(shared) reality, as “the basis of initiation of experience” (1971, 14). For Winnicott
emotional development and the structure of deferment are co-extensive (Birksted-
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1111

Breen 2003). In particular, the developmental aspects of the negative are presented in
terms of “the normality of transitional phenomena” (Winnicott 1971, 15), including: (1)
the infant’s use of transitional objects as the first “not-me” possession (1971, 1); and (2)
the movement “towards experience” from the purely subjective to objectivity and the
object-world. On both counts, Winnicott emphasized the actuality, rather than the sym-
bolic significance, of transitional objects. The negative quality of transitional objects is
seen as integral to the paradox of invention/discovery; the object’s “not being the
breast (or the mother), although real, is as important as the fact it stands for the
breast (or mother)” (1971, 6).
In addition to the identification of the negative with normal development and the for-
mation of self-experience, Winnicott also addressed the psychopathology of the negative
in terms of separation and loss. Although in the original version of the paper (which dates
from 1951), he focused on the circumstances of the healthy infant, Winnicott (1971, 9–10)
nonetheless pointed out that “a persistence of inadequacy of the external object … leads
to deadness or to a persecutory quality of the internal object”. The idea that the internal
object becomes “meaningless” due to a lack of “aliveness” in the external object was part
of the original hypothesis of transitional objects. However, it was only in the final version
of the paper, published posthumously in Playing and Reality (1971) with two new clinical
sections, that the psychopathology of the transitional or intermediary area was fully
elaborated.
The clinical material from an adult female patient, presented for the first time in the
final version of the paper, was used “to show how the sense of loss itself can become a
way of integrating one’s self-experience” (1971, 20). In effect, Winnicott put forward a
new theory of psychic pain based on a comprehensive account of meaning and its break-
down. In his account of a single analytic session, he drew attention to what he called “the
negative side of relationships” – including the traumatic situation of catastrophic disillu-
sionment brought about by the mother’s inexplicable absence. When the knowledge of
understanding is not yet available to the child, “then when the mother is away … she is
dead from the point of view of the child” (1971, 21–22). The unavailability of the mother
results in a decathexis of the object: “If the mother is away over a period of time which is
beyond a certain limit measured in minutes, hours, or days, then the memory of the
internal representation fades” (1971, 15). It is the fading of the “internal representation”
that proves catastrophic, insofar as it interrupts the continuity of being and the primordial
movement “towards experience”. This includes an interruption of the experience of the
transitional area, which, according to Winnicott, becomes gradually “meaningless”. The
reality that the transitional objects convey gives way to something lifeless and unreal
that amounts to a break in the continuity of being. A child who has yet to experience
the vitality of the object internally, that is to say, apart from the “reassurance” of percep-
tual reality, cannot revive the “dead mother” but is left with the remains of what amounts
to a meaningless “experience”.
In answer to my question, a past that has never been present is not subject to recovery
or recollection but can be “remembered” only in the negative:
the only real thing is the gap … the important communication for me to get [from the
patient] was that there could be a blotting out, and that this blank could be the only fact
and the only thing that was real. (Winnicott, 1971, 22)
1112 S. GROARKE

My patient’s boarding bridge hallucination, together with the letter she had not thought
existed, becomes clearer on the grounds that what is “forgotten” loses its reality; that only
the “amnesia is real”. The “real thing is the thing that is not there” (Winnicott, 1971, 23);
indeed, what is “not there” is more real than either the forgotten-retrievable object or the
existing objects that are presently available. Winnicott’s patient reveals this mnemic situ-
ation at its most profound by comparing him to the last of her former analysts, for whom
she believes she will always be searching amidst the prevailing sense of absence. She
acknowledges the greater good that Winnicott provides, while at the same time stating
that “the negative of him is more real than the positive of you” (1971, 23).
Unavailability, decathexis and unlived experience may be seen as the constituent
elements of a negative matrix, the essential meaning of which was set out originally in Win-
nicott’s theory of the transitional area and its vicissitudes. The urge to reclaim experience
under these conditions may become a compulsive activity, something that is repeated
without being integrated, resulting in a narcissistic withdrawal from object-relationships
(internal and external). Repetition issues in this case not from the repressed unconscious,
but rather, from an unconscious that is formed where “the ego integration is not able to
encompass something” (Winnicott 1974, 104). The analytic task consists in helping the
patient gather the negative of blank pain (“primitive agony”) into his or her “present time
experience”, which is how I understand the analytic work that I have described with my
patient. The trajectory from the acknowledged perception of birdsong through negative hal-
lucination to the dream of being born for “the first time in the present” (as it were) reveals an
urgent need on the part of the patient to lay claim to more life. The mnemic activity of rec-
lamation, in this case, presses for a new semantic pertinence. Memory manifests its objects.
This, at least, is my thesis: for the reclamation of unlived experience to mean anything at all
there must be something essentially innovative about the mnemic act. Thinking aloud in the
company of someone who is listening remains the sine qua non of Freudian therapy.
Together with our patients, we “remember” by talking about a past that has never been
present; metaphors of the past elaborate on something that otherwise remains meaningless.
Winnicott’s theory of the not-yet-conceived object provides the groundwork for the
concept of re-descriptive memory: “it is not possible to remember something that has
not yet happened, and this thing of the past has not happened yet because the patient
was not there for it to happen to” (1974, 105; emphasis added). The sense of the past is
occluded by the deficiency of the environment, the unreliability of the mother at the
beginning, combined with the immaturity of the ego. The “event” itself thus admits nega-
tive value. In the aftermath of negated happenings, the act of remembering is directed
towards something that has not happened. There is nothing to remember. The unavail-
ability of the mother at the beginning leaves its mark and, without being remembered
as such, is manifest as a “gap”. There is not always sufficient acknowledgement, on the
part of his commentators, of Winnicott’s insistence on the “not yet happened”, or the
“not-yet-conceived”. César Botella and Sára Botella (2005, 116), for instance, miss the
essential negativity in Winnicott’s account of what “has already been”. Their own work
is nonetheless consistent with Winnicott’s findings and, as such, provides a further elab-
oration on the “not yet happened” from the point of view of the negative of the trauma:
“Something fundamentally evident for the subject that should have happened did not
happen, even though he is not aware of it and, a fortiori, cannot form an idea of what
this negative is” (2005, 116; emphasis in the original).
 INT J PSYCHOANAL 1113

We can define re-descriptive memory as “memory without recollection”, where there is

neither a distortion of reality testing, nor a recovery of the “forgotten” object. In this case,
as the Botellas (2005, 117) point out, the mnemic situation consists in neither a “return
from the outside, like the Verwerfung [repudiation], for it is not an abolition [Aufheben]”;
nor a “return from the inside, as is the case of the repressed, for it is not a memory-trace”.
The Botellas’ analysis allows us to differentiate the negative of the trauma from the related
series of foreclosure, disavowal and repression. The mnemic act, in this case, is directed
upon the “psychical holes” (Green 1980, 146) that remain in the unconscious as a result
of the decathexis of the object, the object that my patient encountered in a letter that
she had not thought existed. Re-descriptive memory works in this context on condition
that the negative simultaneously shows that something should have happened and
presses for a new semantic pertinence. The negative, in other words, suggests that a
“new beginning” (Balint 1968, 132) is possible: “All new beginnings happen in the trans-
ference, that is, in an object-relationship, and lead to a changed relationship to the
patient’s objects of love and hate and, in consequence, to a considerable diminution of
anxiety”. The realization of a “new beginning”, conceived in terms of the relationship
between primary love and therapeutic regression, is comparable, in certain important
respects, to what the Botellas (2005, 117) describe as the work of “figurability”, the ana-
lyst’s ability to grasp the irrepresentable by a retrogressive movement of imaginative
comprehension: “the negative of the trauma is only discernible in the regression of the
analytic situation, in the retrogressive encounter of two psyches”. Finally, the work of
reclaiming the past consists in helping the patient to find or invent something out of
the negative matrix (a fairy tale, a dream) that is no longer subject to the compulsive rep-
etitions of blank pain.

Summary
In this paper I attempt to extend Freud’s notion of Nachträglichkeit on clinical and theor-
etical grounds by applying the theory of object-use to the problem of memory. A case is
presented that draws attention to different types of mnemic activity in a patient’s emer-
gent sense of the past, namely: (1) the retention of bygone objects; (2) the recovery of
“forgotten” or repressed objects; and (3) the reclamation of not-yet-conceived objects. I
elaborate on the mnemic act of reclamation as a type of re-descriptive memory directed
upon the not-yet-conceived. And I argue that this type of activity affords us a sense of the
past through an augmentation of available reality.

Translations of summary

La psychanalyse a notablement contribué à notre compréhension de la façon dont nous

vivons avec le passé ; plus important encore, le concept. d’ « après-coup » (pour lequel
l’auteur de cet article souhaite conserver la traduction anglaise de « deferred action », comme il
l’éclaircira par la suite) remet en question l’association de la causalité avec une direction temporelle
particulière, c’est-à-dire la direction avant-après de l’efficience causale. Dans cet article, l’auteur
cherche à explorer les implications de la « causalité à rebours » (pour ainsi dire), en se basant sur
une application de la théorie de l’utilisation de l’objet au problème de la mémoire. Il commence
par des remarques préliminaires sur la théorie winnicottienne de l’utilisation de l’objet et poursuit
en présentant des observations cliniques au sujet de l’émergence chez un patient d’un sens du
1114 S. GROARKE

passé. Dans la discussion qui s’ensuit, il appréhende la question de la mémoire à la lumière de cet
exemple clinique. L’auteur discute ensuite de l’importance continuelle de l’ « après-coup », tout en
introduisant le concept de « récupération », en tant que celle-ci constituerait une forme de mémoire
re-descriptive.

Die Psychoanalyse hat einen einmaligen Beitrag geleistet, wenn es darum geht zu verstehen,
wie wir mit der Vergangenheit leben. Vor allem stellt das Konzept der ‚Nachträglichkeit‘ (im Orig-
inal in der bewusst gewählten englischen Übersetzung ‚deferred action‘) die Assoziation von Kau-
salität mit einer bestimmten zeitlichen Richtung infrage, d. h. die Richtung der kausalen Wirksamkeit
vom früheren zum späteren Zeitpunkt. Zielsetzung dieses Beitrags ist es, die Auswirkungen der
‚Rückwärtskausalität‘ (gewissermaßen) basierend auf einer Anwendung der Theorie der Objektver-
wendung auf das Problem der Erinnerung zu ergründen. Ich beginne mit einigen einleitenden
Anmerkungen zu Winnicotts Theorie der Objektverwendung und präsentiere dann klinische Beo-
bachtungen zu dem Gefühl, das ein Patient für die Vergangenheit zu entwickeln beginnt. In der
anschließenden theoretischen Diskussion betrachte ich das Problem der Erinnerung vor dem Hin-
tergrund des klinischen Beispiels. Eine Diskussion der fortdauernden wichtigen Rolle von ‚Nachträ-
glichkeit‘ wird zusammen mit der Einführung des Konzepts der ‚Rückgewinnung‘ als eine Art neu
beschreibender Erinnerung präsentiert.

La psicoanalisi ha dato un contributo del tutto particolare al nostro modo di comprendere in

che modo conviviamo con il passato. In particolare, il concetto di ’deferred action’ - rispetto al
quale si chiariranno man mano i motivi per cui preferisco mantenere la traduzione inglese -
mette in crisi l’associazione della causalità a una direzione specifica del corso temporale - ad
esempio, la direzione “dal prima al dopo” dell’efficacia causale. Lo scopo del presente articolo è
di esaminare le implicazioni di quella che si potrebbe definire ’causazione a ritroso’, e di farlo pre-
ndendo le mosse dall’applicazione della teoria dell’uso dell’oggetto al problema della memoria. La
mia argomentazione si avvierà con alcuni commenti introduttivi sulla teoria winnicottiana dell’uso
dell’oggetto, e procederà poi a presentare una serie di osservazioni cliniche sull’emergere di un
senso del passato in un particolare paziente. Nella discussione teorica che segue considererò il pro-
blema della memoria alla luce del caso clinico in oggetto, e discuterò infine la persistente centralità
della ’deferred action’ introducendo al tempo stesso il concetto di ’reclamation’ (recupero) inteso
come tipo di memoria ri-descrittiva.

El psicoanálisis ha hecho un aporte singular a la comprensión de cómo vivimos con el pasado;

sobre todo, el concepto de “acción diferida”, que desafía la asociación de la causalidad con una
dirección temporal específica: la dirección anterior-a-posterior de la eficacia causal. El artículo
busca explorar las implicancias de la retrocausalidad a partir de la aplicación de la teoría del uso
de objeto al problema de la memoria. Comienza con algunos comentarios introductorios a la
teoría del uso de objeto de Winnicott, para luego presentar observaciones clínicas sobre el surgi-
miento del sentido del pasado en algunos pacientes. En el análisis teórico que sigue, se aborda
el problema de la memoria a la luz de ejemplos clínicos. Se examina la importancia de la “acción
diferida” junto con la introducción del concepto de “recuperación” (“reclamation”) como un tipo
de recuerdo redescriptivo.

ORCID
Steven Groarke http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3203-3494

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