Avgi Saketopoulou | New York University (original) (raw)

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Papers by Avgi Saketopoulou

n, Hock, U. and Scarfone, D. (Eds.) (2024). On Freud’s "Remembering, Repeating and Working-Through" London: Routledge, Library of Psychoanalysis, 2024

In this conversation with Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, we discuss their new book Gender ... more In this conversation with Ann Pellegrini and Avgi Saketopoulou, we discuss their new book Gender without Identity (2023), which focuses on gender as always constructed in relation to social, racial, religious, symbolic and psychic trauma. The conversation expands on their theoretical work in terms of clinical psychoanalytic practice.

This transcribed conversation of an online dialogue between Artemis Christinaki, Amrita Narayanan... more This transcribed conversation of an online dialogue between Artemis Christinaki, Amrita Narayanan, and Avgi Saketopoulou introduces readers to Saketopoulou's recently published book, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. With astute questions and through a series of probing observations, Christinaki and Narayanan engage the author, opening up crucial dimensions of psychoanalysis, gender and sexuality studies, and politics. The exchange tracks the three main signifiers of the book, risk, race, and traumatophilia, and articulates Saketopoulou's critical concern with the traumatophobic logics rippling through the field. What emerges is a rich discussion of how Saketopoulou's three terms work within psychoanalysis and the risks, opportunities, and challenges they unfurl in the clinic and in the broader field of psychosocial and psychoanalytic studies.

JAPA, 2023

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we a... more A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalysis. Trauma, we are trained to think, has destructive effects whose ghostly lingerings can, nevertheless, be durably turned into ancestors. But what if we got this wrong? What if trauma is not a piece of shrapnel to be removed but a cause of becoming? And what if the tenet that trauma may be worked through is but a manifestation of a disciplinary spell? Introduction of the concept of traumatophobia invites readers to rethink the relationship of psychoanalysis to healing or repair, and to become attentive, instead, to what subjects do with trauma (traumatophilia). Traumatophilia involves a revivification of trauma, and that is easily confused with compulsive repetition or destructiveness. Traumatophilia, however, also courts psychic energies that can be psychically transformative. For transformation to be possible, however, we need to be working with a notion of psychic life that can be transformed. Careful consideration of a controversial sexual fetish (race play) shows how belated efforts of psychoanalysis to attend to racial trauma have generated new forms of racism: treating the Black unconscious not as a transformative and dynamic force but as housing only repressed representational contents. Considering race play instead through traumatophilia allows a race player's actions to be mined not for unconscious motives or for what past traumata, symbolized or unformulated, those motives carry, but to track their effects. Traumatophilic repetitions, it is argued, deliver traumatisms that may (or may not) be transformational. Questions of ethics are thus central to this paper's thinking, which is grounded in queer of color critique, Black feminisms, and Laplanchean metapsychology. Because traumatophobia preserves the world order (and thus white logics), readers are urged to consider the metapsychology of traumatophilia.

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly

Aperturas psicoanalíticas: Revista de psicoanálisis, 2021

Developmental Perspectives in Child Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy, 2018

Psychoanalytic Inquiry, 2020

The Unconscious, 2020

Discussion of Jonathan House's paper "Après-Coup", same volume

The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 2020

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020

The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2018

Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association, 2017

PSICOTERAPIA E SCIENZE UMANE, 2015

Viene introdotto il concetto di "trauma grave di genere", una sindrome che emerge dall’... more Viene introdotto il concetto di "trauma grave di genere", una sindrome che emerge dall’incontro tra il mancato riconoscimento di genere dei pazienti transessuali e l’esperienza angosciosa del corpo in cui si e nati. Negli ultimi anni, la consapevolezza degli psicoanalisti sulla complessita delle interazioni tra psiche, soma e cultura e progressivamente cresciuta, per cui i rischi psicologici del mancato riconoscimento di genere hanno suscitato un interesse sempre maggiore. Ma la disforia legata al corpo e spesso trascurata anche da quegli analisti che lavorano con l’esperienza di genere. Col resoconto della terapia di una bambina transessuale di cinque anni, nata con un corpo maschile, viene seguito il percorso evolutivo di un corpo non sufficientemente mentalizzato. Mettendo a fuoco le trasformazioni della fantasia inconscia, si mostra quanto per i pazienti transgender sia importante la rappresentazione mentale del dolore originato dal corpo, la quale e una delle condizioni necessarie per una sana transizione transessuale.

Psychoanalytic Review, 2022

In a scholarly yet playful conversation, the authors explore why analytic thought about trans rem... more In a scholarly yet playful conversation, the authors explore why
analytic thought about trans remains so intransigently difficult.
They propose that countertansferential responses to trans
patients manifest not just in clinical work but also as blockages
to psychoanalytic theorizing. They draw on extensive experience
treating trans and non-binary patients, on teaching and
supervisory work, and on analytic scholarship to think about
why and how theorizing on trans stalls. Whereas in the social
realm trans bodies are often hyper-sexualized, in metapsychology
and the consulting room trans is notably desexualized. What
is the cost of that and why does it occur? The authors locate the
problem in the disaggregation of gender from the sexual, arguing
that not only has this separation outlived its (once exigent)
metapsychological utility, but that it is itself a defense against the
anxiety of polymorphous perversity and psychic bisexuality that
trans bodies can awaken in analysts of all genders, and especially
in cisgender analysts.