What is "afterwardsness"

n. (context psychoanalysis English) The concept that an earlier event in one's life can later acquire a meaning.

In the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud, afterwardsness is a "mode of belated understanding or retroactive attribution of sexual or traumatic meaning to earlier events... [from the German word] Nachträglichkeit, translated as deferred action, retroaction, après-coup, afterwardsness". 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'.