The topical debate about the meaning of trauma for the individual and the value of identity grounded on memory reveal the conceptual significance of Nachträglichkeit. However the insoluble bond between clinic experience and theory, Freud’s original purpose, is unsustainable, considering the contribution given by the phenomenological investigations about timedimension and the neuroscientific achievements on memory, which encourage the adoption of a more realistic attitude compared to the zealous Freud’s assumption. The dialectic of two paradigms, on one side the linear-causal one taken up by Freud, and on the other the hermeneutic one introduced by Jung and later followed by Lacan, Laplanche, Modell and many others, pictures the unconscious no more as a merely storage where a truth lies just asking to be discovered, on which the clinical treatment and interpretative action can be based. In the middle of the controversy between the two interpretations of Nachträglichkeit, one aiming backwards and the other one forward, I have chosen the narrative dimension as an implicit peculiarity of the psychoanalysis intended to keep together those two aspects, making the narration the meeting point between being the story of oneself and being the fiction of oneself.[:]
Category: No 2 - June - 2012
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