Sexuality Beyond Consent: Moving Away from Repair and Toward Traumatophilia with Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D.

This seminar explores how trauma, rather than simply fracturing the psyche, can open pathways for transformation. Dr. Saketopoulou introduces the concept of traumatophilia—an alternative to repetition compulsion that focuses on what subjects do with their trauma, rather than how to resolve it. In this framework, returning to the site of trauma becomes a space of potential, a complex psychic zone where agency and constraint coexist. Using the enduring trauma of slavery and racism as a central case, this lecture challenges traumatophobic approaches and highlights how psychoanalysis must confront its own entanglements with racial violence.

We will explore…

• Jean Laplanche’s metapsychological insights on how trauma can be revisited in transformative, rather than retraumatizing, ways

• The concept of passibility—a state of openness to being affected—as central to working with trauma

• A rethinking of trauma through the lens of traumatophilia, which emphasizes the subject’s creative and conflicted relationship to their wounds

• The psychic terrain of limit consent, where constraint and freedom co-exist in complex, generative tension

• The role of desire and repetition in navigating racialized trauma and historical violence

• How traumatophilia shifts our clinical attention from “resolving” trauma to engaging the subject's ongoing negotiation with it

• Ways in which traditional psychoanalytic frames may unconsciously reinforce racial harm—and how alternative frameworks can resist this

Learning objectives:

• Attendees will be able to discuss why notions of healing trauma and of repairing wounds is but one epistemological paradigm around trauma work

• Attendees will be able to list two ways in which a traumatophobic sensibility short-circuits clinical thinking

• Attendees will be able to show how traumatophobia is rooted in white logics and explain why a commitment to anti-racism benefits from a capacity to thinking traumatophilically

• Attendees will be able to list two ways in which traumatophilia opens up new paths for thinking and working with trauma, including racial trauma

• Attendees will be able to explain how traumatophilia bears on notions of psychic
  freedom and psychic agency

• Attendees will be able to compare the different models of the unconscious anchoring
  traumatophobia as opposed to the one undergirding traumatophilia

Originally from Greece and from Cyprus, AvGI SAKETOPOULOU immigrated to the United States to train as a psychoanalyst. She is in private practice in New York City and is a member of the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her scholarship has received the Ruth Stein Prize, the JAPA Essay Prize, and Division 39's Scholarship Award, and she is the co-recipient of the IPAs first Tiresias Paper Prize. Still, few things give her as much pleasure as riding her motorcycle.

 Format

We’d love for you to join us for this virtual seminar with Dr. Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D. on Friday, September 26th, 2025 from 1:00pm to 4:00pm PST. Registrants will receive a link to join 24-hours prior to the event.