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.

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