Psychoanalytic thinking teaches us that trauma leaves the subject fractured, less agentic, more subject to iterative, stalled revisitations of the traumatic event. In this presentation, and with the help of Jean Laplanche's metapsychology, I argue that significant possibilities for psychic transformation and for contact with experience are courted when we make ourselves passible (Lyotard, Scarfone) to returning to the site of the traumatic. Drawing our attention away from the usual -and somewhat fixedframework of repetition compulsion, this presentation foregrounds a different approach which I frame through the concept of traumatophilia. Traumatophilia concerns itself less with what to do about trauma and helpfully draws our attention to what subjects do with their trauma. Therein, I suggest, we find ourselves in the domain of limit consent, that psychic territory where we encounter the vexed entanglements between freedom and constraint, and wherefrom traumatized subjects can make bids to enlarged psychic freedoms. The trauma of slavery and racism's durational persistence offer premier sites and searing examples for discussing these ideas.

Presenter: Avgi Saketopoulou is a Greek and Greek- Cypriot psychoanalyst. She trained and now teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program, and is also on faculty at the William Allanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Mitchell Center, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly and Studies in Gender and Sexuality and her written work has received several prizes including the Ruth Stein Prize, the Ralph Roughton Award, the annual JAPA essay prize, and the Symonds prize from Studies in Gender and Sexuality. She is the 2022 recipient of the Scholarship Award from APA’s Division 39 and, with Dr. Ann Pellegrini, winner of the first Tiresias prize from the IPA’s Sexual and Gender Diversity Studies Committee. Her just-completed book project is provisionally entitled: Risking Sexuality Beyond Consent: Race, Traumatophilia, and the Draw to Overwhelm. Putting psychoanalysis in conversation with queer of color critique, its second part critically engages Jeremy O. Harris’s Slave Play. With Jonathan House she co-chairs the first conference in the US dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche “Laplanche in the States: the Sexual and the Cultural.”