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Group Dynamics Dispatch
26: Avgi Saketopoulou
01:08:50
In this episode, Angelo talks with Dr. Avgi Saket…
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- [00:03]
A
A traumatophilic approach that allows oneself to engage in the risk of following patients to their sites of trauma and seeing what they do with their trauma, rather than trying to be so preoccupied with what to do about trauma, how to make it disappear, and becoming attentive instead in the ways in which it appears and how it can be transformative of energies that we usually try to settle and organize, that that requires a very different way of being as a human being in the world, as an analyst in the consulting room, but that it also has tremendous possibilities for transformative experience. And transformative experience is not an experience that one arrives at through safety or protocols of security. Other kinds of things make that possible. So the book is very much an exploration of what traumatophilic repetitions can mean, what it means to be working as a clinician and to be participating in life in some ways at the border of one's consent.
- [01:12]
B
That's Dr. Avgi Sakatapoulou, today's guest on the Group Dynamics Dispatch. Welcome to the Group Dynamics Dispatch. I'm Angela Siliberti and I'm excited to share with you conversations that explore what it means to live and grow within groups, from our early lives to our professional role as leaders. If you enjoy what you hear and would be interested in supporting this podcast, please consider liking and subscribing, as this really does help. Most importantly, thank you for listening. Well, welcome to the podcast and I'm very excited to be sharing with you this interview with Dr. Avgi Sakatapoulou. I also just wanted to acknowledge that this is a different kind of interview from the ones I've done in the past, in that Avge's work does not focus specifically on groups or group leadership. But I am such a fan of her work because I find her ideas so engaging and so applicable to the emotional themes that I work within my groups. And I might imagine you do too. And I had a very interesting experience with this book, where I was reading it before the AGPA Connect Conference this year, and then when I went to the conference, this book just kept coming up in conversations with different people who were also reading it, and everyone seemed so eager to talk about the ideas and the ways they were being impacted by them that it began to dawn on me I should really have Avge on the podcast. I think this could be really interesting to talk with her about how some of these ideas intersect with groups. So I really hope you enjoy this interview and here's some background information on Avge. Originally from Greece and Cyprus, Avgee immigrated to the United States to train as a clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst. In her New York City based private practice, Avgi treats children, adults, couples, and polycules. She works with a wide array of issues such as trauma, anxiety, depression, and relationship difficulties. She has extensive experience with variant genders in both children and adults, as well as queer sexualities, and her practice includes a racially and ethnically diverse range of individuals. In her academic work, Avgi teaches at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She is also on the faculties of several other psychoanalytic institutes, including the William Allanson White Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational center, and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where she offers intersectionally informed courses on psychosexuality and gender. Her scholarship has received numerous awards and prizes. Still, few things give her as much pleasure as riding her motorcycle. Today's interview focuses on the recent publication of her book Sexuality Beyond Risk, Race, and Traumatophilia. I hope you enjoy this interview with Dr. Avgi Sakatapoulou. Well, welcome Avgi. Welcome to the podcast.
- [04:35]
A
Thank you, Angela.
- [04:37]
B
I'd actually like to start at the end of the book. At the end of the book you talk about an experience with your dad, watching his love of parachuting and how that kind of inscribed this appreciation for experiences that involve risk and discipline. And I thought it would be interesting just as a way of setting the context for this conversation to talk about that.
- [05:00]
A
That's so delightful. This is actually, it's not at the end of the book, it's in the acknowledgment section. So I haven't thought of it as part of the book, but of course it's very much part of the conditions that make the book possible. So I'm delighted to talk about it. So my father, as I say in the book, jumped out of airplanes for a living. And I remember as a child watching him get ready, I remember sometimes going to the field where he would land and watch him land. There was never too much anxiety in my family about risk or danger, and only in retrospect did I come to understand that that had to do with how extremely rigorous and serious my father was about what it means to be risk taking. Because obviously jumping out of airplanes time and again comes with considerable risks. And I remember as a child asking him time and again. He also used to train people on how to jump out of airplanes, and I remember asking him and hearing all kinds of stories about what does it take for somebody to go from saying that they want to do this training that they want to do to actually taking the one step that differentiates somebody who has never jumped out of an airplane to somebody who has, which is the step of actually stepping off the plane itself. In retrospect, it seems like it's always been a question about the bending of the will. Like how do you suspend something in yourself that tells you you shouldn't be doing that you're stepping into something, however well prepared you are, it may or not go well and do it anyway. So I've heard all kinds of stories about that, which inflected how I even listened to clinical material or how I work with patients.
- [06:40]
B
Can you say more about that? I find that fascinating.
- [06:42]
A
I remember my father telling me a certain kind of like macho testosterone really takes over that that's part of what the high that a lot of men and he used to train men at the time, women were not trained to jump out of airplanes. A lot of men would actually use the accelerant of testosterone and male competition to get themselves to jump off. But I remember him telling me that you never know quite how strong somebody is until you come to the place where they literally have to jump off a plane. I remember asking him, you know, when. When people have to jump off a plane, they usually fly. Jump off a plane in a stick, in a group, the group is called a stick. And everybody has to go at the time that they have to go, otherwise the stick is going to be delayed. People may end up landing in all kinds. Places. So there is no time for, well, I'm ready. I'm not ready. Are you, Are you really sure? Do you want to do it? Like the kinds of work of preparedness that we sometimes do in psychoanalysis is not the domain of paratroopers. But I remember asking him as a child, what do you do with somebody who's hesitant? And he told me that, you know, for professional paratroopers, they get kicked out of the plane. And I remember being both shocked and riveted with the idea that somebody would take that kind of risk with somebody else's life. And I remember asking him about that and him telling me, look, you have to understand these people are very trained. They've done this many, many times in different kinds of conditions. And also that when that happens, the trainer also jumps right after them. And there's something about this notion that it is your risk to take and somebody jumps in there with you, and that risk also becomes somebody else's responsibility. So there's something there about the. Creating the conditions. Obviously, with, with in clinical work. We don't push people into things, but we do something which I think we don't talk about this way often enough, which is that we do try to take patients in domains that are not comfortable for them, that can feel to them like they're going to die, and which actually could take them to places that are costly to them or unbearable. So a lot of what it means to do clinical work is to be both assessing that risk and making oneself a participant in that risk, even though, of course, that participation is entirely asymmetrical.
- [09:12]
B
Yeah, we're already getting so into so many of the themes that I'm interested in talking with you about, But I think that this already gets into some of the heart of the work around how you view trauma, the ways we typically talk about trauma, and then new ways that you propose. This idea of traumatophilia, obviously, both psychoanalytic
- [09:33]
A
ways of thinking and the general culture is pretty enthralled with the discourse around trauma at the moment. So you have this proliferation of conversations around attending to trauma, witnessing trauma, sitting with trauma, healing trauma, repairing trauma. And part of what I argue, which is a little bit. Sounds a little bit paradoxical to many people, especially in our field, is that even though I've also seen people feel very relieved to hear this said out loud, is that trauma cannot be cured. Nobody gets back to where they were before they were traumatized. Now, you might say some people have said to me, okay, but that's not what we mean by healing trauma. We're not imagining some magical restoration. We're imagining something else. But I think that when you start thinking about the erotic or even gender, which is not the topic of my. Of this book, the topic of another book I have coming out is that when you find that a patient is aroused around the site of their trauma, there you begin to see that our tolerance for. Well, you never get over trauma. It just gets transformed, begins to hit a nerve and to hit a wall. So a lot of the examples that I use in the book are actually precisely about what it means to encounter trauma in the domain of the erotic and in pretty atrocious conditions, historical conditions that then enroll the erotic into the sexual. So one of the propositions that I make in the book is that we have become, as a culture, quite traumatophobic. And what I mean by that is not that everybody should go out and get traumatized, but that trauma happens. It is both foundational to our being, which I think we should talk more about. What I mean by that, and there's also Then contingent trauma that is social and positional, that has to do with one's social identity, their race, their sexuality, their gender, and so on and so forth. But that once trauma happens, our attitude as clinicians is very traumatophobic. Like, how do we make that disappear? How do we make it go away? And how do we diminish its impact? And part of what I flesh out through a series of different examples is how a traumatophilic approach that allows oneself to engage in the risk of following patients to their sites of trauma and seeing what they do with their trauma, rather than trying to be so preoccupied with what to do about trauma, how to make it disappear, and becoming attentive instead in the ways in which it appears. And how it can be transformative of energies that we usually try to settle and organize, that that requires a very different way of being as a human being in the world, as an analyst in the consulting room, but that it also has tremendous possibilities for transformative experience. And transformative experiences is not an experience that one arrives at through safety or protocols of security. Other kinds of things make that possible. So the book is very much an exploration of what traumatophilic repetitions can mean, what it means to be working as a clinician and to be participating in life in some ways at the border of one's consent.
- [12:50]
B
Right. You talk about kind of putting trauma back into circulation. In that there's something about circulating trauma, especially clinically, that opens up possibilities for retranslation. And there's an intersection here with Laplanche that I think is fundamental to how you view trauma as kind of a gateway to transformation. Can you talk more about how La Planche's ideas of trauma and sexuality influence this way of viewing trauma?
- [13:19]
A
Yes, and I should also say that the word traumatophilia, the term is a term you find in Laplanche, and it actually starts with Carl Abraham. But there are sparse references to it in Laplanche's work. Meaningful, but sparse. And what I try to do in the book is basically blow it up into very developed theory and conceptual apparatus. But what Laplanche gives us, which is, I think, very unique for a psychoanalyst, is a way of understanding, of thinking about trauma as actually being not a disruption of an organized subject, but in fact, foundational to our very sense of becoming. And here's what I mean by this. For La Planche, the original encounter between adult and child is surcharge. An adult who has a sexual unconscious in a childhood does not yet have an unconscious. Because for Laplanche the unconscious is not something we're born with. But something rather that we acquire. And that acquisition, that process of acquisition. Is very fascinating and strange. And here's what it basically amounts to. Which is that in the encounter between adult and child. The adult addresses messages of attachment and of care to the child. Those messages may be straightforward or ambivalent. Or compromised by unconscious factors. Like envy or hatred or identification, and so on and so forth. But he says, whatever these messages may be conscious. And the ones that the parent is aware of and unaware of. Surcharging all of these is yet another dimension. That has to do with the ways in which the adult's infantile sexuality alights in the contact with the infant's vulnerability. And that means that every contact with a child, every embodied contact. Implants is his word onto the child's psychophysiological skin. Something that is enigmatic. Which is basically an energetic surcharge. Which is not about meaning. It's not about the mother's ambivalence or the father's homoerotic anxiety. It is ontologically so about this otherness in the parents unconscious. That the adult themselves cannot understand. It is not just undeciphered, but it's indecipherable. This, La Planche says, is not just enigmatic. It's also traumatic for the infant. Who now has to kick into gear to try and make sense of it. And making sense of it is what he describes as translation. Which basically amounts to symbolizing something or generating a fantasy about it. But what is critical about La Planche's intervention. And what is very unique to him. Is that this enigmatic contact, which is anthropological. It doesn't matter who your parent is, whether they've been analyzed, whether they've been traumatized. Whether they're a good person or self aware or not. It is there just by virtue of the fact that they're human. And by virtue of the fact that they're in contact with an infant who is sentimentally vulnerable. There's something about that contact which installs trauma at the very beginning of psychic life. And it's how the infant deals with trying to churn something out of that enigmatic encounter. That the sexual unconscious of the infant begins to develop. And the infant develops an ego and a sense of self. So at the origin of the infants becoming. Is this very strange intervention. He calls it eruption, we might say infraction of the other's otherness into us. And the other's otherness here is not the otherness of I'm female And they're male, or I'm white and they're black, or I am poor and they're rich. It's the otherness that they are themselves not aware of by virtue of their having an unconscious life. So in Laplanche's model, this really fascinating thing happens, which is that it is trauma that occasions your becoming. So rather than other models where you are and then you have this traumatic experience that disrupts you, and then you're trying to figure out what to do with this thing that interrupted you. And now is it small and you can patch it up? Is it big and you now have to do something else with it? Are you forever damaged? While there is a pretty to trauma in La Plunge, there is a moment before the enigmatic implantation. There is no subject before it. So we start already not just traumatized, but the only condition for becoming human and acquiring psychic complexity is trauma. And that has really revolutionary implications for thinking about psychic life.
- [17:46]
B
Absolutely. So trauma itself really becomes this point at which both the ego gets formed and the unconscious gets formed. Is that right?
- [17:55]
A
That's exactly right. So the infant tries to make sense of what just happened to them in their parents enigmatic attraction. And the infant cannot make sense of it logistically, partly because the infant has an immature cognitive and emotional apparatus, but also, and primarily because there's nothing to make sense of. Like what enigma is, is not a set of concealed meanings or meanings that the parent is unaware of. Enigma is definitionally that which escapes the parent's understanding. So this inserts in the child's psychic life what Laplanche will call a foreign body and what Dominique Scarfono will call the irritative spine of something that will forever remain an irritant in the sense of it will never be possible to fully translate it. So some fantasy will be generated around it. And this cumulative layering of fantasies makes up the ego, which then gets registered as memory. So it feels like it's always been there. And this is what happened to me, as opposed to this is the story that I made up around this thing that happened to me that cannot be narrated. And there's always a remainder. There's always translation. Laplanche says, always partially fails. What fails gets repressed. And that's how the sexual unconscious comes about. As this kind of like material that could never be organized into meaning, that was in some ways resistant to being organized into meaning, and that is ontologically opaque.
- [19:27]
B
But it's going to prompt a person continually throughout their life to revisit this site, this irritant.
- [19:33]
A
Precisely. And in fact, I think that it may be even more helpful for the thinking that we're doing today to say that it's not just that translation fails, which is the term that Laplange uses, but the term that I use in the book is that the part of the enigma that can not get translated is a fugitive part that escapes translation, rather than translation fails. And that escape, Dumas Carfono will say, is also the source of art. It's a guarantor of our freedom. It's because a part always escapes that you always have a chance of going back and doing something different with it or about it rather than about it. So it's not about healing it, but it's about kind of like pulling on that thread in a way that actually could undo something about you. So whereas in most ways of thinking, if you're thinking of trauma as interrupting you and you needing to be repaired, then this kind of interruption is dangerous and problematic. But if trauma is always already there, and the problem is not the interruption itself, but what you've also done with interruption, then being able to revisit it and the possibilities that get opened up by a traumatophilic, a disposition that is philic, that is amenable, that is even hospitable to these kinds of visitations, then something else can happen with it. You could do something else with it. And that is where the transformational possibilities of. Of a state that I've come to call overwhelm reside. So rather than being afraid of being overwhelmed because it's too much, because we're going to be damaged, it's going to be. One is going to be unable to deal with the consequences of that overwhelm. Overwhelm also becomes a condition of possibility for psychic transformation, which, again, is a very different way of thinking about trauma and psychic, kind of like what one can psychically bear. Because the point here is not to keep the ego intact, but precisely the fact of its undoing.
- [21:31]
B
Right. I love how you deconstruct a lot of the ways. We typically think about overwhelm as something pathological or dangerous and actually reframe it as a site of possibility. I actually wanted to read a passage from the book where you talk specifically about overwhelm. Overwhelm can put something in motion. However, overwhelm should not be romanticized, even though pleasurable. The ego. Ego's breach is an intense state that may be experienced as painful, disorganizing, even dangerous. Still, overwhelm does not destroy the psyche. It only liquidates the ego's obdurate links. Unbound states do and should worry us because of the risk for mental health crises, severe acting out and so on. And also because we sense that their pleasures can have magnetic effects, sometimes with detrimental impact. But the distinction between trauma and overwhelm is an important one because it allows us to be less panicked about individuals who have a propensity to pursue experiences that can breach the ego's barrier and who search for trauma like experiences.
- [22:40]
A
Thanks for pulling out that segment. Because part of what can happen if one becomes really interested in the way that I'm talking about things is that one can forget the risk that is inherent and in some of these experiences. And on the one hand, it's because we don't forget and are overtly focused on that we're so afraid of these kinds of experiences and try to close them down for our patients while we treat them in the consulting room as if they're necessarily symptoms or only evidence of repetition compulsion. On the other hand, if we approach these states as oh, we got this all wrong, let's be traumatophilic, we could miss the fact that this unbinding that I'm talking about, which basically, to say this very clearly for people who may have not read the book, what this unbinding does it. It delinks representations from the energy of the sexual drive. Part of why the sexual drive needs to be bound is because it can be too much for. For psychic life to bear. So some. Some of it get always gets translated as we talked about before, and sometimes some of it does not. But when the ego comes undone in the state of overwhelm, which I hear use as a noun not as to be overwhelmed, but a state of overwhelm, what happens is that these links momentarily come undone and there's a surge of psychic energy. The surge of psychic energy can then go in a variety of different directions. Meaning the ego then goes into overdrive trying to like, reconstitute. And it creates itself again. And that creation might, given the time that has passed from the original creation to now, has at its disposal different kinds of materials so that something better can come about. That's what we mean when we talk about transformation in the positive sense of the word. But anybody who has had difficult experiences with these kinds of like, ego shatterings that become traumatic also know that a lot of very difficult things can also happen at moments like that. And that in fact, for example, somebody who becomes paranoid might be an example of somebody whose ego then gets reconstituted in a way that actually works worse than it did before. So there's nothing that is about a technique here or something that can be controlled. In fact, I talk about these kinds of erosions as traumatisms that only in the apreco will we know if they became expansive or traumatic. So part of what I'm trying to say is that there is a tendency to approach moments like this as being inherently traumatic, when in fact we will not know until after the fact if they became so or not. But to close them down because they might become traumatic also exacts a cost that can never be counted. One can never register how much possibility was lost. So it's always easier to go in that direction of trying to prevent it rather than enter what is really an adventure. And I think that one of the things that I encourage clinicians to think about in this book is that clinical work is not so much a journey, but really a real adventure where one encounters, if one is open to it, a variety of different crisis points that could go in a variety of different ways.
- [25:55]
B
I think that the way you talk about approaching it and working with it is different from how we often might think of it. From orientations that look at attachment theory or affect regulation, where there seems to be a big emphasis on slowing down and decelerating. And you seem to be talking more about actually encouraging a sort of leaning in and exploration and encountering with some of these energies that can be very destabilizing. Is that true or how would you see that?
- [26:24]
A
Indeed, like a lot of attachment driven ways of working, are very concerned about emotional regulation precisely because it can become overwhelming, or to use Jessica Benjamin's term, like too much. Certainly I am not saying, you know what, we should jettison all of this. I'm not arguing that. I think that the kinds of things that I'm describing are not a way to live an entire life or to do an entire treatment. They are accent points. But what I also want to say is that oftentimes our move to direct patients towards emotional regulation because dysregulation is seen as de facto problematic or traumatic, also comes from our own anxiety and from our own worries about what might happen. And we are not wrong to worry. As I was saying earlier, this is not about romanticizing any of these states, but. But it can do a different kind of damage, which I might think of as the damage of precluding somebody from being able to do something else with their trauma. And oftentimes patients come to us already in states of experimentation that we then shut down. So it's very important to Understand that I am not offering traumatophilia as a clinical technique. I am by no means saying we should go out and, like, try to push patients to see what they can experience or encourage them to take risks. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying, actually some patients come to us already doing that or as a result of the treatment, in the course of the therapeutic encounter, they can come to a point where they can take those kinds of risks, and it is then us who hold them back. And that is what I describe as traumatophobic. So this prioritizing of slowing down has emerged, at least in psychoanalytic thinking, because of the anxiety of, like, moving too quickly into things. Right. But it has also now become almost of a gospel, like as if. And we apply it uncritically, almost as if, which also precludes action in a variety of different ways. So we hear rhetorics around slowing down. Also in the political domain right now, especially the political domain as advocated by psychoanalytic theorists, like, about kids transitioning. So kids wait years and years and years to be able to come out to their parents to claim themselves up to themselves. And this attitude of, like, slowing down because something could go wrong is also conjugated on the same grammar of protectionism, which can actually eventually exact its own pain and preclude states of becoming just because of our own anxiety.
- [29:02]
B
So there's a way can get co opted, really, and maybe out of our own resistance to having some of our ideas retranslated.
- [29:09]
A
Absolutely. I think resistance is a key word here, because the ego. I speak a lot about conservatism in the book, and I clarify that. I'm not just talking about, like, being conservative in terms of progressive politics or conservative in terms of, like, being outdated or being like, not keeping up with the time, so to speak. I'm very interested here in the ways in which both clinicians and patients are invested in keeping things stable and preserving their egos. And so does the psychoanalytic field. I mean, if you think of like, anything that has been a huge transformational point even in the psychoanalytic field, has had to be taken almost against its will. Like, think about, you know, clinicians in psychoanalysis could not train to be analysts. The question of lay analysis unless you were an md People had to be sued for that to change. Right. So a crisis usually has to precipitate if a very tight binding is to be undone. It happens at the limit of one's consent. And in the clinical setting, it happens in what I have come to describe as, like, escalating excitations, sometimes with repetitions of things that may look and often are extravagantly squanderous. Rather than, I'm doing this so that I can get that, or, I'm doing this so that I can have a closer relationship, or, I'm doing this so that I can achieve that goal. So patients begin to act in ways that has traditionally been thought as just acting out. And another framework to consider, another lens for these kinds of engagements, is to wonder about how they may be participating in a process of escalating, Creating escalations that may actually break through the ego's resistances and the ego's tendency to keep itself whole. And that breakthrough is neither a plan or an intention. If you ask a patient, what are you trying to do? One should not expect that the patient will say, you know, what I'm trying to do here? I'm trying to break down my ego, because this is not working, and I hope that something better will come up. These are effects that kind of, like, materialize after the fact. And this the way that you're nodding. And I think that's kind of like, I can see that you have a sense of what I'm talking about. But sometimes we demand of our patients a certain kind of legibility and a certain kind of intentionality that is entirely not in keeping with how psychic life works.
- [31:36]
B
Exactly. And I think part of why I find this so animating is because I think that there's such links to group, where anybody who's been a part of a group, I think, understands just how inherently overwhelming that experience can be and the excit that can occur in group. And part of the way I see or think about the group leader's responsibility is to titrate levels of overwhelm, but to also be careful about not foreclosing particular kinds of conflicts or states of arousal that can begin to unfold in the group. Because that's exactly what often leads to the greatest moments of psychic change. But you make a point that, you know, there are a variety of different ways that traumatic like experiences or states of overwhelm can be very intense. But a part of what makes it psychically transformational is the need to have it linked with the sexual drive. And I wanted to ask you more about why the sexual drive and what about. Also a part of my training is in modern psychoanalysis, where SpotNet's focused quite a lot on the aggressive drive. Do you see a difference between the two? Or is Laplanche kind of looking at a revision where they're actually integrated. There's a destructive sexual, for example.
- [32:54]
A
That's a really great question. And for La Planche, they're not integrated. In fact, he would say they've always been together. So let me give you like a short pressy of what his position is on that, which is, he says in the three essays, when Freud first proposes the notion of the sexual drive, as he's trying to figure out, where does sexuality come from? Oh, it doesn't come from sexual abuse. Where does it originate? Freud starts out with saying, well, it's not exactly biological. I want to move away from that. He eventually ends up tumbling into that anyway. But part of what he says, meaning Freud, he posits the notion of infantile sexuality, which he says has a number of different qualities, sadism and masochism being two of the of its most important components. In fact, he says that sadomasochism is the most important of all perversions in the infantile sexual. Laplanche notices that somewhere around 1914, when Freud puts together his theory of narcissism, which is about self love and integrating kind of like Eros, becoming mature love through integration. Now you're able to love, not just direct the sexual drive to part objects, but to a whole object. And that whole object love also has to do with, like, healthy narcissism. Laflanche says, all right, so now that he has turned the erotic into whole object love and all of these beautiful and respectable things, what's he going to do with the rest of it? Like, what's he going to do with kind of like the more peripatetic, destabilizing, unbinding properties of the sexual? It's like, well, now he's backed himself into a corner. Now he's going to need a new drive. Hence the death instinct, Right? So Lapland says the death instinct, the institution of the death instinct as a separate domain is actually a symptom of how Freud became too frightened of having posited a sexual that is definitionally also about the aggressive. So that creates a double problem. It creates and encourages us to think that there's a sexual that can be completely de aggressivized. So healthy sexuality now becomes a sexuality that is clean from kind of like a tamer, more domesticated version of the sexual. And it also establishes the idea that there's aggressivity that is not sexual, that is not sexual in its constitution. Right? So to go back to your question, he doesn't bring them back together. He says, actually these two should have never separated. And for that, for him, the drive is always sexual and aggressive together. Or rather to be more accurate than aggressive, aggression is but one version of the drives unbinding forces, like the more centripetal disaggregating like entropic aspects of the drive. Does that touch on your question?
- [35:40]
B
It does, yeah. Because I think it also gets to the fact that we need something that has that kind of propulsive force in order to stretch and rupture the ego in potentially generative ways.
- [35:51]
A
Propulsive forces is exactly the right term because what the forces of binding do is not propel, but actually organize in a more centrifugal way. But the forces of like pulling things apart, the more heteroclit forces that actually can do that work. And it's those forces that we try to slow down when we talk about emotional regulation, when we talk about kind of like things not getting out of control. So one of the things that I wanted to ask you about and see how you think about that in terms of groups is one of the things that I've seen, and I think many of us have observed recently in the effort for our fields to reckon with racial trauma is how things play out in groups, like our professional conversations with each other, where there is some kind of racist enactment. Somebody brings up that what is going on here? People who feel called out feel upset and shamed. And oftentimes the group leaders kind of like. And I'm thinking here of organizational leaders, but I'm curious how you think about this as a group dynamics leader move to kind of like settle those energies, which usually works on the side of not having anything change that is not the intent, but eventually preserves the group's ego, so to speak. So I'm curious about how you think about that and what these ideas, how do you sit with that and what do you do with the unbinding that threatens also the integrity of the group?
- [37:19]
B
You know, it is such an important question. And it's also one that I find very challenging and one that I have an ongoing relationship with. You know, in the sense that I've found that I'll think about it one way and then I'll have experiences or I'll get new information and then I'll need to revisit, you know, how I have been thinking about it. That's happened for me several times. So I think it is something that's ongoing and it's one of the things that drew me to this book because I knew you were going to be talking about race and. And I'm eager for more information and for new ideas about how to think about these things. I think one of the intersections that I found between what you were talking about in the book and group had to do with bending one's will. And if there is a pull or a tendency to try to seek comfort, to be willing to bend our will. And staying with something that's uncomfortable and provokes a lot of chaotic feelings and feels very unsettled. And I think that that's so applicable to group in the sense that, you know, these enactments do happen. And there is such a pull to want to avoid it or gloss over, to patch things up. And so I think a lot as a group leader about how to stay in it with the group, with each other, how to convey a feeling to the group that we're not going to have anybody in here get scapegoated. But this is an opportunity for us to look at and contend with very painful material that affects all of us and that we're all impacted by in different ways. I think it's going to be something that needs to be revisited. Because it's not like in one group session, you know, that kind of racist enactment is going to get worked through. It bears returning to in subsequent sessions and continuing to talk about it and revisit it. But as a group leader, I also just think for myself about those times where I can bend my will, other times where I don't feel I can, and then looking at what's happening there, bending my will in the sense of continually challenging myself to try to think about this in new and hopefully helpful ways, both to my groups and to myself and to the people I interact with.
- [39:34]
A
And it's interesting how you're bringing repetition in, because at least in the ways that I was trained as an analyst, I think in ways that many of us are trained like we are taught to treat repetition with suspicion. But one of the things that I say in the book is that repetition deserves our commitment and even our trust, even as its effects can not be anticipated ahead of time. And that it is through repetition that that something gets not consolidated, but perhaps agitated enough for something to crack around it rather than come together. That's part of what I'm hearing you say it is.
- [40:11]
B
And it's one of the things that I kept thinking about in connection with your book. The way that you, I think, deconstruct our ideas around repetition compulsion and appreciate it as an opportunity for these kind of progressive crackings. And I think that that kind of links actually to Your discussion of slave play and how that became itself an experience that you revisited. You went to the play over and over again in different cities. And I would love to hear you talk about that experience and how it influenced the way you think.
- [40:42]
A
I have developed a very intense relationship with this play. The experience of viewing it was gifted to me by somebody who clearly knows me very well, even though even she did not anticipate what would come of it and how preoccupied, if not obsessed, I would become with this play. So I saw it the first time. I was really stunned by the closing scene, which basically, for people who have not seen it, I'm not going to go into the details of its plot, but what it does is it offers something very disturbing that it then wraps up in the second act, offering you insights that you kind of know about, but also you see how you're also yourself caught in them, especially kind of like white people, but not only. And then the third act explodes everything and leaves you at a moment of an explosive opening that you're then left to deal with yourself. So the usual art where there's like an escalation and then a denouement, and then you're able to kind of like look at all of it together and extract a message or kind of like the moral of the story, this play does not do that for you. And of course, it's a matter of taste to be exposed to that degree of disturbance again and again and again. And clearly I have the appetite for it. But, you know, I started watching the play again and again and again. I went to different productions, I traveled to different cities. I was just in Ohio, where they did the first regional production. At the beginning it felt like, oh, I'm just interested. And then at some point I realized, wait a minute, like, I can't stop. And then rather than trying to stop, what I did was I somehow kind of like surrendered to that and wondered what I would travel through rather than where was I going with this. And I allowed myself to have the experience again and again and again. And. And some things have come out of it. Clearly. I've written. I've written a lot about this play. I'm still writing about this play. But I would say that these are the low hanging fruits of what came out of it. That part of what came out of it through an experience that I've come to see now as my becoming overwhelmed and something rupturing in me has also been on the level of the intensity of experience. So this is something else that I eventually talk about when I talk about states of overwhelm. That what they leave behind is the new binding or the crisis. But what. What happens in the moment of the ego's undoing is something extremely powerful, which, as I said earlier, the ego will kind of, like, rush in and try to, like, patch up. So the outcome, so to speak, of that experience is whatever the ego produces in the aftermath of that breakdown. But what I've been recently more interested in is how these kinds of experiences leave behind a trail, so to speak, that an experience like that has been endured. They open you up to the realm of experience, which is not so much about the experience of something, but about what it means to have experiences or to allow yourself to be in experiences where. That touch you to the core of your being. Not because they. They speak to an interior element in you or because they touch on this trauma or that childhood memory or. But because they vibrate on the level of. In Laplanche theory, I would call the enigmatic. They expose you to something that is beyond your understanding. And I describe it in the book as having found myself before experiences that felt like something was towering over me. That made me feel small, but not in the sense of being diminished or unimportant, but unimportant in a really good way. That there's something much larger and that that one's relationship to that opening is, I think, an aesthetic experience. And I don't just mean this in the sense of, like it's a pleasurable experience or a good experience. It's also an experience that is. That is anguished and uncomfortable. And I believe that some psychoanalytic treatments also open up the space for that in ways that is certainly not in the books that I read or in the supervisions that I had or in the experiences that I was supervised on, but open up to something else.
- [44:58]
B
Yeah. And I think that that speaks to one of the new ideas that I was having as I was reading this book about what actually happens in those encounters. You know, we typically think about art and theatrical performances as evoking something from us. And here you seem to be really addressing the ways we're actually acted on by their performance in unexpected ways, in ways that we almost just need to submit to. Curious if you would expand more on that.
- [45:26]
A
Yeah, I think that the word performance is key here. Because I have talked a lot about the content of this play and what it does and what it touches on in terms of racial relations and the adjacency between violence and trauma and the erotic. And certainly that's but part of why I didn't mention it today is because there's also something about art that. And not all art is like that. And not all art needs to be like that. Art that address that feels like it addresses you, that it acts on you as opposed to try to show you something about yourself that you didn't. No. Or didn't have an easy time accepting. Or something that you are not in touch with. And you see this and now all of a sudden you have. You're able to formulate it or at least vibrate on a similar frequency in a way that makes you feel seen or understood. I'm not talking here about experiences that make us feel affirmed or known. To the contrary, I'm talking about experiences and exposure to performance which is an embodied experience. It's not like reading a text. It's about being around the bodies of the actors and the bodies of other audience members who are also going through something. Not always together, not always laughing at the same moments, not always gasping at the same moments, but an embodied experience which opens up something unknown to you about you, which you cannot understand. And it's not about understanding it, it's about being exposed to it. Expose something to something not only in the play that is beyond your grasp and understanding, but also something in yourself that is beyond your grasp and understanding. And those experiences, I think are extremely intimate. In my opinion, it's the most intimate one can be with oneself. To be might be. It might sound strange to say that intimacy is also about being exposed to that opacity in oneself. But I think it's a very non dominating relationship to oneself and to each other. And for that reason the possibilities for intimacy at those kinds of encounters are very different than intimacies that have to do with recognition or affirmation or being seen or known by the other.
- [47:43]
B
So an experience of intimacy that's actually very disrupting in the sense that it resonates with, would you say, our opacity?
- [47:51]
A
Yeah. And which does not lend itself to language. It's. It's whatever language even now we are using to whatever language I try to find to speak about those experiences. It always leaves. It's always wanting, it's always lacking. I often hear from people that the. The book is both exciting but also frustrating. I find that delightful, irritating, as you said earlier.
- [48:16]
B
Yeah.
- [48:17]
A
And that we turn away from that irritation as a culture. Certainly. I mean, I'm concerned about the ways in which right now therapeutic methods are also turned into. Are neoliberalized turned into. Effectiveness comes in this way. Outcomes Trauma certainly has been inserted into the capitalist machine of product and result. And that is dehumanizing, even as it promises repair, even as it produces this kind of like subject that can then go out, love and work and reproduce. And it plugs us into the capitalist machine in a way that is entirely disalienating, even though here the counter to disalienation is not a self knowing or a comfort with oneself, but a very personal encounter with one's own alienness to oneself.
- [49:10]
B
Part of what you pull out of the play is has to do with sadism. And you really, I think, challenge our typical understanding of sadism and propose threads around ethical sadism. The way ethical sadism is both apparent in the play and for example, the lack of an intermission, but also how we might think in terms of ethical sadism about ourselves, internally, socially, and even clinically.
- [49:41]
A
Thanks for pulling on that thread. I think when I started writing the book, I thought that I was writing a book about eroticism, about how trauma has an eroticism to it. And part of the plays about the erotics of racism, which is not a way that we like to think about racism. Kind of like the libidinal aspects of not just racial difference, but also racial stereotype and racial oppression. So already this moves us in a domain of thinking about ethics that is not about justice, it's about something else. It's not about unjustice either. Like this deep old does not work for us as well in the domain of the erotic. But when I finished the first draft of the book and I submitted it to my press for feedback, and I had my readers do amazing work, kind of like giving me feedback, I realized that I needed another chapter and that that was not thrilling to me. I was not happy about that. I just wanted to edit whatever I be done with it. But now in retrospect. And that was the sadism chapter, which I'll say a little bit more about. But in looking back, I now think that the book was always going to be about sadism and that my next project has to be about sadism per se. And here's what I tried to do in the book about sadism. We have been accustomed to thinking about sadism as only destructive. And certainly in psychoanalysis sadism is always put together with masochism. Like if you have one, you have the other. It's just an identification or a counter identification, we're told. But throughout the book I do something that really comes together in the final chapter, which is that I show that these are not complementary forces. These are actually quite different mechanisms and argue for flesh out how sadism has now been. I track the history of this through kind of like the Marquis de Sade, from whom the term is sourced and what happens in World War II and the Holocaust. I'm not going to go through all of that here. But what I want to say is that they do have a historical tracking of how I come to say the following, which is that sadism right now has coagulated into. It's a destructive force, or in some domains of BDSM life, it's an as if mimetic force, like where two people play at sadism. But that's. That's a really infirm form of sadism. So between this very infirm, limp form of sadism that is actually just make believe and this really destructive, catastrophic sense of sadism, we do not have the space for what I have started calling an exigent form of sadism. Exigent because it is necessary and which is not about getting carried away by one's destructiveness, but actually it's about the ethics of what it means to be able to provide opportunities for others and for yourself. And I think we do this in clinical life a lot for something to not get closed up, my meaning, so quickly and to not get quickly flooded by the need to bind something and organize it in the play. One of the things that I've come to think of about Slave Play is that it's a very sadistic play. And in fact, the director in the Broadway production, Robert o', Hara, said something really striking about his decision to not offer an intermission and to not allow people to recover from the violences, the sexual violences that they see and perhaps from their own responses, which may be more ambivalent in the first act. Jeremy o' Harry says, I wanted people to get turned on in the first act and then wonder about why they were turned on. So Robert o' Hara says, I want people to come in and choke a little bit. He says, you've come to see a play that is called Slave Play. You want to get up and go to the bathroom. You want to pee, you want to be comfortable. No, I'm not going to let you have that. I mean, this can sound cute or funny or like an oddity of the director. But when you watch the play and if you go into the play not knowing what you're going to see, but going unaware, the way I saw it and many people saw it, this costs you. It's difficult. It's difficult to go through it. And it leaves you with something because it doesn't give you a respite to be able to reorganize yourself. It escalates and escalates and escalates. And if you don't try to bind all of that to some degree the place such that it's very hard to do that anyway. But if you give yourself over to that, which is not the same thing as submitting, if you give over yourself to the energies of the play and you let it act upon you, you leave kind of a wreck in a really beautiful way. But the terribly beautiful is not the domain of understanding or provision. It's the domain of a certain kind of sadism that exposes you to something, and it's not for everyone. And people can absolutely get up in the middle of the plane, walk out, like many people did. In other words, Robert o' Hara is not doing something sadistically destructive, like people can get up and leave, nobody stopping you. But if you're going to stay there, you're not staying there on your terms, you're staying there on somebody else's terms. And that is what I mean by that being at the limit of your consent, you can always get up and leave. But if you stay, you are in a different kind of universe where gravity doesn't apply the same way, psychically speaking. That kind of sadism, I describe it as an odd form of care, and it requires a lot of the sadist, of the ethical sadist, just like a lot is required of the clinician who will not back off when the patient says ouch, but she will also not barge in with violating the patient, but who will stay in there even as she knows that what she's doing could hurt the patient, even though that may not be her intent. And you will know the next session or the next week, or in a month or in a year. And you bear that as a way of providing something. And I think that there's something sadistic about that, but not sadistic in the kind of, like, harmful way, but sadistic in the sense that you have to garner something in yourself that will help you resist your own impulse to keep things safe. Because it's always going to be, unless we're talking about, like, somebody who is kind of like, psychopathic, like, we don't want to hurt our patients. We don't want. I don't think that when Robert o' Hara says that he wants his audience to choke, that he thinks that he wants people to be damaged, but he does want them to suffer in a way that is necessary for what the play requires.
- [56:21]
B
Right. It reminds me of a recent conversation I had with my supervisor, who talks about not getting recruited. You know, typically we want to, both within ourselves and clinically with clients, kind of move into a space of soothing, of reassuring, of providing legibility. And yet what gets foreclosed in that and the willingness to stay with something difficult and perhaps what can even be a form of clinical pleasure, you're pointing
- [56:52]
A
out that there can be a pleasure in that is part of what's critical also in my argument that we can and often talk to each other about these states of abstinence for us. Like, you have to do what's right. It's easier for you to do it this way, but at the end of the day, it's better for the patient or of some kind of neutrality, or insert your psychoanalytic theory term here. But what that leaves out is that the pressure for that, that we ourselves have to give into is also a pleasure. And I think that's what makes it so difficult for us to stay with it, even as precisely because it is pleasurable, precisely because of our ambivalence. And here I'm not talking again. You see the risk with thinking, with destructive sadism. The slide is very easy. I'm not saying, well, we should be sadistic with our patients because it's better for them and we're going to get off on watching it. Of course, that's not what I'm saying at all. But the ethics of it. It's also about being aware of one's own pleasure while also doing the difficult thing of not letting one's fear about it hold you back, or letting one's anxiety about hurting the patient hold you back. And it's always like a technical skill to figure out how to do that, how to time it with what patient, at what moment. This is not something to gorge oneself on. It's not for all moments, but it is important that we have it available as one possibility.
- [58:16]
B
This also kind of leads into conversations around consent, and you critique our ideas about affirmative consent and propose what you term limit consent. Can you say a bit about both of those?
- [58:29]
A
Yeah, I mean, it's so connected to everything that we've been saying so far. So, you know, if the ego's job is to keep itself intact and to keep the self from experiencing any kind of disturbance, nothing that is new will happen with the ego's consent. If I may be permitted this anthropomorphizing expression, anything that is new has to be tested with the limits of the ego's consent. I bring this example in the book about having observed a colleague play with her daughter. And her daughter starts this game. Anybody who has been around a toddler knows this game. Do this thing that scares me, the delight, the squealing of terror, but also, stop, start again, stop, start again. And then after they do this for a while, the little girl says to her mother, we're going to play a different game. I tell you to stop and you don't stop. Now, we know this game in the sexual domain like, as a. Like sexual encounters where one is flirting with a limit, but part of what happens in that moment, which is a different kind of moment, and it's not sexual per se, I argue, also draws on the sexual drive. Because if the little girl no longer is asking for something that is emotionally regulative, like it's exciting, but regulated, and she is asking whatever that ask means of her when it comes from a young child, is asking to travel into a domain where she could be overwhelmed into what may be described as not the too muchness of experience, but the more and more of experience. Then the question arises, what does the mother need to be thinking to agree to participate in that? And what is she participating in? And one could say, yeah, that's not going to go well, don't do it. And if that's what you say, that's what you say. But if you're going to consider it, then the question of consent, as in you and I have a conversation, we set our limits, we agree on something, and I don't violate them, and you don't feel violated. And then we have maybe not a great experience or a great experience or whatever we have, but we're not going to have violation if I don't override them. That is conjugated according to a different kind of grammar. And for that I suggest we need a different kind of consent that is less about guarding the self and more about a willingness to explore what's at the limits of what can anticipate. So in a more sexual domain, I start the book with talking about this woman who has negotiated with being slapped by her partner. They've talked about how what is okay, what is not okay. And she is slapped in a way that feels so exquisite to her that she. Safe words. So this is not a situation. She withdraws her consent not because the other person hurt her, but because the other person gave her something that was so beyond what she expected. So limit consent. I use this example to begin to show is also consent Is also about relationship to oneself. To what will you allow yourself to experience when you're choking on slave play? Are you going to sit there and let yourself choke without panicking that that means you will die? And allowing something in you perhaps to be killed a little bit or to get up and leave because it's too much and there's no right or way. This is not about legislating what the correct way to consume art is or to be exposed to another person. It's more about different people need different things at different moments. It's more about exploring what happens when one actually steps into the domain of. Into the more and more of experience, which I argue can only be done with limit consent. And both bear responsibility, even though the responsibility is always asymmetrical.
- [62:15]
B
Yeah. And it seems like it puts us into relationship with that threshold around what we can really bear.
- [62:22]
A
Yes.
- [62:23]
B
Would another way of looking at limit consent be surrender?
- [62:28]
A
I think surrender is an interesting word, especially in the way that man again talks about it, where it's not about giving in to someone, but giving yourself over to something. But I would say that the something that one gives oneself over to is in oneself, not the other. So, for example, if, as many black people felt around slave play, if a black person were to say, I've been traumatized by this play, it would not be inaccurate to say that Robert o' Hara bears some responsibility for that, Even though I think it would also not be accurate to say that he did that to anybody because people could have gotten up and left. But he's also not uninvolved in having produced a play that he purposefully wants to be overwhelming in some way. Having directed a play. So what is required of the audience member who sits there, endures the play? I think it requires a certain relationship, which I think the word that may be most useful here is not surrender, but passability, which is not possibility, but passibility, which is a certain kind of capacity to be permeated by something that will have unpredictable effects and to stay in that state, which is a state between activity and passivity. It's not passive, but it's also not doing something. You don't go into a play expecting the play to do something to you. If you do that, you're no longer in a passable state. You're in. You're doing something else. That condition of passability is very much connected to limit consent, which again, is why it's something that comes from oneself rather than something that another person does to us.
- [64:09]
B
Oh, I wish we had more time to just keep talking about and exploring all of this. But we're approaching the limit of our time. So I did want to ask just one final question, which since the book's release, there's been so much engagement. I know you've been doing a lot of interviews as you've been talking about and thinking about unthinking and rethinking these different concepts. What new or surprising developments are occurring for you as you keep revisiting this material?
- [64:38]
A
In the book launch, I was in conversation with my corresponding editor. They're really brilliant and very generous editor that I had, Joshua Chambers Letson, who said something that he had not said to me before. He said it live, and I heard it for the first time live in the he said to me that he has been afraid to talk to me about the fifth chapter about ethical sadism. I take Josh very seriously wherever he tells me something, because I know how careful of a thinker he is. And it was with that encounter and then conversations that happened subsequently that I've come to understand how big of a dare it's been to tread into that territory, which you hear my own traumatophilia in the background. I want to now go more into that. So that tells you something about me. But I think that even though I intellectually knew it, I didn't quite appreciate how distressing that is. And I use the word distressing in the context of dysregulation and discomfort that we've been talking about in this conversation. I have not gotten as much pushback as I expected about limit consent, even though of course the obvious concern would be what about me, too? How do you adjudicate limits? But I also think that psychic life does not lend itself to the juridical legal model, which we also need to ensure. I mean, feminism has fought bloody wars to take consent seriously.
- [66:05]
B
So where do you find yourself going with your thoughts around sadism?
- [66:09]
A
I've been thinking very much about groups, and I've been thinking very much about racial enactments in groups. I have another book that's coming out that's on traumatophilia and gender. Let me say something about this first. I think that the traumatophilic framework has a lot to give us in terms of thinking about what subjects do with their trauma. And we have been afraid to think of what gets churned out of trauma. But what Black studies and Queer of Color critique gives us is a way of thinking about how starting out with a traumatized self as people of color, and especially black people do, is not necessarily a sentence. There's something about how whiteness imagines an intactness and a repair and understands itself as deserving a repair, or the human subject as deserving a repair and a return to an uninterrupted state that I think is swirled throughout psychoanalytic theory in a way that is extremely problematic. So that brings me to your question about where does this go next? I don't think there's a part two of this book, but I have become very preoccupied with what it means to think about ethical sadism in groups where violence is enacted, and especially about the issue of shame. Oftentimes we are told that if somebody's aggression is named, especially aggression that they were not aware of, that they will be shamed. And I have really been struggling with this idea of how is it that we use shame as a deterrent to thinking as if there's something wrong with somebody feeling ashamed about something that they've done that is problematic, and how shame can become its own defensive barrier. Like, you have made me feel ashamed, so therefore I'm not engaging with you. And what would it mean to stay in interaction despite feeling of shame? And, you know, I think that that requires an ethical sadism because of course, when somebody feels ashamed, all we want to do is like, make them feel better about themselves, ourselves, and for us to feel better.
- [68:07]
B
I think it's so apropos to group because, you know, if shame is so foundational to our human experience, and yet we're constantly tiptoeing around members or even ourselves as leaders having those experience, then what gets foreclosed? So I love that you're addressing that and I can't wait to read more.
- [68:24]
A
Thank you and thanks for kind of like sharing your thoughts about how you work with groups. I had never thought of my work in the context of a group, so that's really exciting to hear.
- [68:32]
B
Know I'd love to keep talking. Thank you so much for this time and looking forward to more Avge.
- [68:37]
A
Thank you, Angelo.