What theorists have I looked into?
Afterwardsness is the concept that an earlier event in someone’s life can later acquire a meaning. The memories of someone’s mind are repressed which has only become a trauma after the event took place.
Sigmund Freud’s theory is highlighted by theorist Jean Laplanche’ theory.
“Freud’s concept of afterwardsness contains both great richness and great ambiguity between retrospective and progressive directions. I want to account for this problem of the directional to and from by arguing that, right at the start, there is something that goes in the direction from past to the future and in the direction of adult to baby, which I call the implantation of the enigmatic message”.
With afterwardsness, Freud used this idea to think about the way out histories are constantly being revised in the light of current experiences. Our histories are necessarily our experiences of our histories and this may, and does, change in profound ways over the course of our lives.
Why look into Sigmund Freud?
In my current situation, I still suffer the fragments from the illness that I suffered from in China and reflecting back on what happened then has enabled me to think critically about my Chinese and English illness work.
