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. Audience is anyone involved or interested in mental health and psychodynamic work.

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

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.