The Re-turning of the Screw: The Question of Intent and the Risk of Ideality—A Response to Saketopoulou’s Essay “To Suffer Pleasure” (original) (raw)

Studies in Gender and Sexuality, 2017

Abstract

ABSTRACT In her paper “To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality,” published in Studies in Gender and Sexuality, Volume 15, Number 4, Saketopoulou proposes an alternative interpretation of perversion that allows the analyst to recognize perversity’s “productive potential” (Saketopoulou, 2014, p. 255). In this paper I offer a close reading of Saketapoulou’s essay to address 3 contentious issues in her arguments: (a) the author’s proposed definition of perversion and its relationship with the concept of polymorphous perversity, (b) the potential of transgressive sexuality to “shatter” the ego, and (c) the status of the analytic dyad in the case itself and beyond. As I attempt to demonstrate, Saketopoulou’s legitimate and necessary call to move away from dogmatic, pathologizing, and dismissive approaches to perversity requires an even more radical reinterpretation of both the concept of perversion and of what it means to listen analytically to “perverse sexual scripts” (Saketopoulou, p. 257).

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