Saketopoulou’s  work advances an alternative exegesis of perverse sexuality that permits an analyst to regard it not from within a state of alarm but with the capacity to recognize perversity’s generative potential. Relying on Laplanche’s theory of infantile sexuality, she suggests that the sexualization of suffering is developmentally installed in sexuality’s very ontology. Although frequently and reflexively conceptualized in psychoanalysis as a demise of the sexual function, perversion can be oftentimes sexuality’s aspiration. Through its interembodied transgressiveness, perversion recruits the body’s materiality to perform meaningful psychic labor: to facilitate the transformation of intergenerational debts we have inherited from others in the form of enigmatic parental and cultural implants into a relationship to oneself.

Saketopoulu, in this paper, begins a very overdue and important discussion about consent and its complication and contradictions. She suggests the term limit consent  which does not function under the auspices of conscious control and aims to bring about experiences of novelty and surprise. Moving beyond the binary of active/passive, limit consent engages the subject’s passibility (Lyotard), a soft surrender (Ghent) to an other who, in turn, has to agree to push the former’s limits in order to produce fresh experiences. Limit consent, this paper argues. enables the pursuit of states of productive dysregulation, that Saketopoulou calls overwhelm.

Neither the purview of repetition compulsion, nor of self-destructiveness, overwhelm is a surplus state that issues from within an attuned dyad and which is best understood in reference to the economy of the infantile sexual. In its apex, it can bring about a shattering of the ego (Bersani). Ego shattering can function akin to Laplanche’s notion of the un-binding of the ego (2005/2011). It can occasion the un-tethering of translations that may be at an impasse from their encrusted and established meanings. In the context of ongoing analytic work, these newly freed enigmatic bits can be intercepted in the work –and specifically in the transference/countertransference- reshuffling the deck, and making room for new translations that may better serve the subject.

In her introduction of the term ‘overwhelm’, Saketopoulou contributes to the contemporary discourse on sexuality in a creative and transformative way.

We are looking forward to discuss sexuality, perversions, and the enigmatic dimension of our life, our limits and our cooperation in transgressing them.

Continuing Education Information:

*****This Program is valid for 3 CEs*****

The International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0202.

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International Association for Relational Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy (IARPP) is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Mental Health Practitioners as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychoanalysts. #P-0037.

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For information about IARPP’s Continuing Education Program, please contact Lucia Lezama at LLezama@iarpp.net