Beyond Platitudes and Party Lines: Trauma as Generative Resource in Queer Life (Online Presentation)

2 CE Credits for Psychoanalysts, Psychologists, and Social Workers

Registration closed, Tuesday, March 26. 

A particular epistemology of trauma now wields an outsized hold over psychoanalytic theory and practice: trauma, we have come to accept, is of destructive, if not catastrophic, effects. But what if we got this wrong? What if our staunch commitment to psychoanalysis as a healing practice invested in the working-through of trauma is but a manifestation of a disciplinary spell? Naming as traumatophobic the imagining that trauma is possible to work through, Saketopoulou will discuss an alternative model, that of traumatophilia. A traumatophilic framework can help us move from the clinical preoccupation about what to do about trauma to orienting our attention to what subjects do with their trauma. This presentation takes as its starting point a film that attendees will be given a link to watch ahead of time. The film is startling and raises powerful questions about trauma, oedipality, transness, and sexual desire. This meeting will be an invitation to have a real conversation that goes beyond platitudes: about gender, about trauma, and about psychoanalysis.

Avgi Saketopoulou is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst living and practicing in New York City. She is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, where she also trained, and her published work has received several awards, including the Ralph Roughton Award, the annual JAPA Essay Prize, and Division 39’s Scholarship and Research Award. Her interview on relational psychoanalysis is in the permanent collection of the Freud Museum in Vienna. Her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia, is published by the Sexual Cultures Series, NYU Press. In 2021 she received, with Dr. Ann Pellegrini, the International Psychoanalytical Association’s first Tiresias Essay Prize. That essay appears in their book Gender Without Identity (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023).

Download Flier

Email cmps@cmps.edu if you wish to register from outside the US.