What Comes to Mind
Conversations about psychoanalysis. Two practitioners talk about working with the unconscious - the uncertainty, the suffering, the pleasure, the strange.
Join me -- Allison Greene, a psychoanalytic psychotherapist -- as I sit with psychoanalysts and talk with them about their writing and their work.
What Comes to Mind
Avgi Saketopoulou
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Avgi Saketopoulou, psychoanalyst and author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia talks with me about her Slave Play immersives, why we might want to resist asking 'what do I do with this theory?,' and exigent sadism in the consulting room.
Welcome. This is what comes to mind, a podcast about psychoanalysis. I'm your host, Alison Green. In this episode, I sit down with Avier Sakatopoulou, a New York-based psychoanalyst who serves on faculty at the NYU postdoctoral program in psychotherapy and psychoanalysis and teaches in other psychoanalytic training programs as well. Her book, Sexuality Beyond Consent, is one of the most theoretically innovative works in contemporary psychoanalysis. One that asks what might happen when we focus less on what can be done about trauma and become more curious about what can be done with trauma. In this episode, we begin with the immersive weekend study experiences she created and runs around Jeremy O'Harris' slave play, and then we find our way, as ever, into the consulting room. Here's my conversation with Avi. Hi, Avi. Hi, Alison. Thank you so much for coming today.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for inviting me.
SPEAKER_01So we're gonna talk today about the slave play immersives, and I think we'll need to orient the listeners to that. But first, I I thought I might start by sharing with you, because you in the book Sexuality Beyond Consent, you invite readers to sort of give themselves over to you to take a risk with you and let the book act upon them. And after we last spoke, I I was reflecting on my experience and I thought I might just share that with you. I was reflecting on it as I was going to sleep, so I was sort of in that hypnagogic state that I love. And so I guess I mean in the book, you you put so many different discourses in conversation with each other, you know, critical theory and queer of color critique, performative studies, philosophy. I'm many years from my time in the academy. And so pretty immediately, and I'm somebody that loves to learn new words, that really excites me. But pretty early on, I was like, my list of words that I need to look up is is getting pretty long, which I did. I I enjoyed looking them all up. And um, but I but as I was thinking about it, I was like, oh, I I needed to find a way immediately to start translating for myself what you were talking about. And I read the book, it did, it did act upon me in in ways that I felt required me to sort of pause and put it away and then come back to. And as I was falling asleep, I thought, yeah, it was almost going back to it, it almost felt as if it was against my will, the way that I was coming back to it. And so that I thought was interesting. And then, as I think I shared with you when I finished the book, I immediately had this thought of, okay, now I'm gonna read it again, I guess. And so there's the the repetition. And I thought that was um maybe a segue into talking about slave play immersives, because I wonder for you about repetition with um not just creating them, but also in the structure of the way that you structured them. But maybe we could start by talking a little bit about slave play for you and what led you to create these immersives.
SPEAKER_00It's it's such a beautiful introduction because it is not just speaking to the content of what I've been writing about, but more so to the experience of it, which is actually really, really important to me. The section of the book where I invite the reader to give themselves over to me, just like I give myself give myself over to the play, is the one that I worked on the most, pretty much from any other conceptualization in the book, kind of like the wording, the wordsmithing, going back to the text, and that paragraph took me hours and hours. So I'm glad that it stayed with you, and I'm glad that it connects with this hypnagogic, like dream-like state in which the book is like sitting with you, but also working on you, and you're working on the book. And the the delight to start again that you were talking about reminds me of this is a phrase actually from Anne Carson, who I talk about in the first chapter uh in the introduction to the book, where she talks about, and she's a poet, so of course she has a way with words. She talks about the paradox of trying to approximate something and not quite being able to reach it. And for her, how that is an erotic experience. And she says, if you're the kind of person who delights in, who appreciates, who has an appetite uh for these kinds of experiences, you're delighted to start again. So what you're saying about finishing the book and saying, what else am I gonna do now than reread it? I think also situates this conversation, what you're bringing, your own sensibility that you're bringing to this conversation in a particular kind of aesthetic, an aesthetic that has to do with repetition, and repetition not as a form of mastering something, but as a form of being exposed to something that is enticing, but is perhaps at the limit of what can one can fully appropriate into themselves or fully understand about themselves. So the question about the immersives, should we say a little bit about the play first? So that's I think so. I think that would be helpful. So Slave Play came out in abroad on Broadway in uh 2018. It had been produced in a smaller production at the New York Theater Workshop in downtown New York. And it was a piece that was written by a black, queer, very, very talented writer, playwright, uh by the name of Jeremy O'Harais, who has since become actually quite famous. But at the time, he this was his first play, he was younger than 30, and he put out this piece of art that was both provocative and funny and absurd and incredibly painful all at once, in a way that really stunned audiences, and people had very strong reactions to it. People either loved it or hated it, it had devoted followers, but also people who wanted to argue for a cancellation of the play or a cancellation of the playwright. And as a psychoanalyst, you know that when you are in the presence of such intense reactions, something is being touched. But I didn't know any of that when I first went to see it. I went and saw it blind, so to speak, without having any sense of what I was going to see. The ticket was given to me as a gift from my partner who guarded the experience for me by not telling me anything about it. Uh, so I was very lucky. I'm I consider myself very lucky. I actually feel always very ambivalent about people who read my work and then try to see slave play because I feel that I've spoiled it for them with too much representation, too much meaning. But the play is really about what happens at the intersection of racial trauma and the erotic, and has a set of propositions, not arguments, but openings into how we might think of the entanglement between the two that are quite shocking for some people and quite surprising and challenging. It's a it's a really thought-provoking and affect-provoking and body-provoking play. So I started, I became obsessed with it. I saw it the first time when it finished, I had the same thought that you had with a book, which is that I I now have to say it again. What else am I going to do that say it again? And I was pretty stunned by it, stunned in in all the ways, in all the meanings of the word. And then I thought as I was going and seeing it again and seeing it again, and I wanted to teach around it. And I say around it because it's a play that you can't quite sink your teeth into. It kind of like it thinks its teeth in you as opposed to you sinking your teeth in it. Um so it invites a certain kind of dispossessive quality in watching it. I mean, one can watch it differently, but that's that's the viewership that I'm interested in. I thought that there's a lot of material around it that I could help organize, um, that I could help organize the thinking of it, but not in a way that shuts it down. So I taught it, I taught with those materials, and then I realized that the quality of repetition was missing. And the quality of um kind of like the relentless exhaustion that the play produces would have to be reproduced in an experiential dimension as well. So I started doing these immersives. It really started as an experiment. I had never heard of anybody doing something like this before. I talked to my co-thinker and collaborator, Anne Pellegrini, who has been an incredible influence and very central to my thinking, about doing something that had not been done before. And like Anne was very encouraging, and I was like, I'm gonna go for it. So I did it the first time, and then something came out of it, and I started doing them regularly. So at this point, I'm I travel wherever slave play is showing, and I offer an immersive experience to colleagues and people from other actually it's colleagues, only people in the mental health field, which is, you know, recently I did an immersive on another piece. Uh, the marathon, I didn't call it an immersive, but it was not only for uh clinicians. But slave play immersives have only been for clinicians. And so I started doing them regularly. I fly wherever it's showing, and I offer it, and most of the time it runs.
SPEAKER_01We're talking about repetition, and I noticed in the structure of it that there is a repetition built in. I should say for the audience, I haven't done the slave play immersive. I had wanted to, but couldn't because of a clinical conflict. And actually, um, as an aside, this is this was sort of the genesis for creating this podcast was wanting to have these types of conversations. So thank you for that. What an honor.
SPEAKER_00So the way that it happens is I make the announcement, usually on my social media, that Slave Play is going somewhere and that I'm going to be running an immersive, and ask people to send me an email if they're interested, telling me a little bit about why they're interested. And then clinical conflicts, unfortunately, always come up because it is a small community in a town of clinicians. Once this the group is set up, what I do is people cannot get in the group until they have tickets, two tickets for the performance. So I ask people to decide to apply for the immersive without knowing if they're going to get in, but needing the tickets because I cannot run an immersive with people who have not seen it twice. So the idea is you get your ticket, you write me the email, you get your ticket, and then of the people who end up in the group, I ask them to go see the play once and then read a thick packet of around 400 pages of essays and articles about racialization, about psychoanalysis. We work a lot with Jean Laplanche, with Glissand, with various people who give us both anchors, but who are also quite capacious in how they think, like Fred Moton, so a lot of artists as well. So people read this text and then we meet for a full day. So we start at nine in the morning and go until 6 p.m. And we talk about the text, but we also want to talk about the experience of having watched it. And then that evening, we go and watch it all together again, a second time. And then the next day we meet again for half a day to note what else we noted or what other experiences we had in watching it the second time, how the previous day went. And some what I've what I've observed, and I didn't expect this necessarily when I started doing the immersives, is that things happen in the same the second day that bring the texts and the conversation we're having alive in a way that cannot be done by design, um, that cannot be predicted ahead of time. And things begin to happen in the group that that bring in a more fleshy way the processes that we're describing the previous day, which starts out as you can imagine, a group that doesn't know, most people don't know each other, people are timid or want to show that they understand the play. You know, people come in with who they are. But over the course of the day, and certainly by the second day, a lot of things have happened that revivify, traumatophilic reviv revivify in the space, even of the immersive some things. And that has been really exciting to find out about and to see happen.
SPEAKER_01What has surprised you the most about the immersives?
SPEAKER_00You know, when I said at the beginning that when I started doing them, they felt very experimental to me is both because I didn't know how they were gonna play out, but also because I didn't quite know what I was doing. So if you ask me, like, what do you want people to get out of it, out of them? Even if you asked me that today, if I were to be planning another immersive today, I would say I really don't know. We're gonna find out after the fact. But I have a lot of faith and confidence that things come out just because I I know the play very well, I know its power, and and also because the the kind of sensibility, both conceptual and effective and aesthetic, that I bring to how the immersives are run is very traumatophilic. And that can't but open up things that happen in real time. Uh, so people tend to have pretty intense experiences around it. Um, of course, there's also people who come in expecting to have an intense experience and then feel feel disappointed they were not able to produce it or that the immersive was not able to produce it. Um, and to me, this is all part of the range of what can happen in this kind of weekend, which I think of as an encounter.
SPEAKER_01I was wondering if, in the creating of these immersives and seeing the play twice and reading these readings that I imagine are quite evocative, if in a way you were sort of setting the stage for the possibility of an aesthetic experience for the participants.
SPEAKER_00Not intentionally so, but retrospectively looking back on it, like I think that you're I think that what you're saying is right. And to me, that's much more important and interesting than studying a bunch of text together and walking away with a liberal approach to I mean that the the play is very much about race and trauma and intergenerational transmission and erotics. It's very easy to I think flatten and um flatten the plane to a less complex version of what it is. And it is easy to use theory uh as as a as an aid to that. And I I knew from the start that I didn't want to do that, but if but I would not necessarily have formulated as formulated it in the way that you just did, even though I think it's accurate, which is that I am interested in people having an aesthetic experience, not just with the piece, but also with each other. In fact, I think that the immersive puts some processes, psychic processes, in motion that can have that capacity.
SPEAKER_01Well, you mentioned that you that the immersives are for clinicians. Was that a a deliberate choice? And what were you what was your thinking?
SPEAKER_00It was a deliberate choice. And it comes out partly of my frustration of how psychoanalysis and the clinical domain is speaking about racial difference and trauma right now in ways that I find to be somewhat, I mean, I would call them traumatophobic, like thinking that trauma is just about understanding what happened. There's certain sequella that we are trained to expect accompany trauma, and to then learn to identify them and use a certain set of techniques, you know, um mirroring kind of like trial identifications, um uh opening up the space for, and I'm gonna put this in air quotes difference, and I'll explain why I put this in air quotes. These are all things we are trained to do and conditioned to do, and eventually, like anything that becomes merely manualized or becomes a method, it can become flattened and drained of its possibilities. So I've felt a lot of frustration. As psychoanalysis has been trying to open itself up to difference, to actual difference, not difference in quotation marks. Um, I've found that a lot of these interventions fall flat, that they become about intersectionality, a certain kind of um, not that intersectionality is bad, but a very um impoverished person of intersectionality that is oversimplified into identity categories as opposed to the full range of what difference can mean. And that difference is not something that can be tamed or taught or fully fleshed out ahead of time. You encounter it, and you encounter it in a moment of an aesthetic experience, and then you, the clinician in the room, have to go off script in a way, and to do things that have to do with you and with the other person who's sitting with you, not to follow the papers and the essays and the teachings. And I I wanted to, I mean, my fantasy was, and I I actually don't know if it plays out this way, my fantasy was that in generating a space where we could encounter the grotesque, where we could encounter the perverse, where we could encounter the sorts of things that that that were very fearful uh when they come together, like the idea that you might find eroticism in a traumatic experience, and that's not not just something that somebody needs to get over, but something that may move you into trauma, to invite people to stay with, linger in the wound, as opposed to try to patch it over or heal it or cure it or or repair it and just move on. It felt to me that this was an offering specifically for clinicians. Um so you know, I've had academics who want to do it, and I've had other people, artists want to join it. But to me, it felt really important to probably because the immersives are small, they by by their nature, they can't be very big. There's only depending. I've never done an immersive with more than 15 people, and even that I did that in London, and even that was very big. Now I wouldn't do one with more than 12 people. Eight, I think, is ideal. I wanted to save those faces for people who work clinically so that they can encounter a different way of working with difference that is more traumatophilic and less anxious about brushing up against trauma.
SPEAKER_01I thought it was so important that it's clinicians because I'm imagining that to work with your theory, the analyst has to be willing to encounter something in themselves in those moments. And to bring clinicians together in a context where they are going to actually have potentially have that experience is so valuable before trying to work with it with patients.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And I would say your phrase is so interesting that clinicians have to be willing to encounter something in themselves, um, because that is absolutely the case. And it is also true that that willingness is not something we can exercise, that we are more hit by the force of something in ourselves that we didn't see coming. It is, as I would say, it happens, I would say, as I would say, at the border of our consent, rather than you know, for example, that you have a history of feeling paranoid when a patient is unclear because you in your own family of origin grew up around a parent who would become very mean or cruel, and then you became hyper-vigilant. So you know that constellation. And then there's a question of like, are you willing to find it in yourself when it happens with a patient and to acknowledge that it's happening with a patient and to work through that so that you can encounter the patient? Or are you willing to pay attention to how the patient's dynamics trigger your dynamics and how the two of you get caught in an enactment? And we have a lot of theory in our field about both of these sets of uh possibilities, about the analyst counter-transference as a problem that the analyst has to solve, or as a co-construction, uh, as a role responsiveness, as Sandler would have it, enactment as relational theory would have it, that you you then look at and become curious about, and from that comes something useful. But but I was interested also in what in the things about ourselves that we encounter not as pieces of knowledge or as something that we don't yet know about ourselves, and we will come to understand, and then once we understand it, you have some mastery over it, but also about the kinds of curiosities, um, appetites, strangenesses, um including bizarre or grotesque um uh experiences in the body or um interests in the patient that couldn't quite be classified or taxonomized in these other ways that we have of thinking about things. And I I felt that a a piece like slave play that is so relentless and Seductive. It belongs to a class of art that I've begun describing as sadistic art, in the sense that it lures you in to force you to encounter something. It lures you in so that you can stay, but then you encounter something that you may not quite be able to that may make you confused about yourself. A lot of people leave the play and say, but I feel confused. What just happened? And confusion, I think, is really important here. I wanted to have an opportunity to go into all of these experiences in any way an immersive can, which is not the same thing as art, um, and see what can come out of them. And in that sense, it was just a curiosity without a goal. Um, even though I have faith that curiosities open things up and that we don't have to be so teleologically invested in how do you make something happen.
SPEAKER_01Right. If we can use this as sort of a springboard just to talk more generally about some of your ideas, because I've been I've been thinking about them a lot. I know that, well, I've heard you talk about you you you use Laplanche, you put La Planche to work, I think, as you say in your in your work. Um, and I and I have read you talk about the way that Laplanche opens up vistas for people and then doesn't tell them what to do with it. And that you find that to be generous. And I and I was holding that as I was thinking about um this question that I'm about to ask you, because I imagine um that at the same time, because especially among clinicians, there's been so much interest in your work. The question has must have been put to you, what okay, what do I do with this? Maybe that's just me, but whenever I read theory, I'm like, okay, now how do I use it? And I'm just wondering how you answer that question, or if you do.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, that question is asked of me a lot. And I think it's, you know, anybody who writes theory is asked, what do we do with this theory? But I think the specially asked of theorizing that does not give you like a clear path to technique. And I would say to get to your question, let me also say one of my concerns about doing this discussion with you about the immersives is that in talking about what I have seen come out of it, somebody could listen to it and think, oh, that's what Avi wants out of the immersive, or that's what the goal of the immersive is. And then somebody comes to the immersive with a goal of trying to produce an aesthetic experience or trying to produce an enactment or however you would call what happens in the immersives. And this is this is always a problem when you write about when somebody says to you, What do I do with this idea? The goal is we may not think of themselves of ourselves this way, but we're asking for masters. We're asking for masters who will tell us what to do and what to think. And I say this fully aware and having myself asked questions like this, and still sometimes getting tripped up into asking these kinds of questions of people whose work I'm interested in or I admire. But especially when you encounter something new, this is a big chunk. What I'm gonna say now is a big chunk of the theorizing that I do in sexuality beyond consent. The first impulse in a contact with something unknown that that that incites you is to try to understand it or to try to master it, to try to grasp it. And I think that the question of what do I do with that is an ask of the person who ostensibly knows the theory to tell you how it is to be used. It it is an out from having to encounter it for yourself and having to think for yourself what you're going to do with this. And I think that that's partly because people want teaching, but I think it's also partly a way of turning away from oneself. Because at the end of the day, whatever I say somebody should do at any immersive, which I never do, but if and if I were to, or whatever I would say about how somebody should use the concept of traumatophilia clinically, at the end of the day, you still have to go in and do it yourself. And if you're doing it by means of what you think I should you should be doing, I think you should be doing, then you're not really in it. You're more in conversation with me and with my my desires or your fantasy of my desires, then you are in conversation with what it is about these ideas that made you want to close the book and start again.
SPEAKER_01Right, right. And and the um the desire to ask you what what do I do with this is a way of um you might say, like trying to organize um the uncertainty and everything else that gets stirred up in me as I as I read this theory and let it act on me. And it's that um keeping that open, being able to keep it open with a client in the room, keeping the wound open, I think is the term that um you've used. And so I was very drawn initially to the work because I I have long thought that you can't heal trauma. I mean, and I and I I would say that was one of the main um things that I discovered about myself after sort of five-year analysis. And I'm very familiar with um the wish and the fantasy of wanting to believe that there is some way of healing something. And and I say fantasy because you talk uh beautifully about the fantasy of wanting to return to a or believing that there's some sort of pre-traumatic state. Um, and this is why Laplanche is so important. So I I guess I guess this is a a roundabout way of saying how perhaps I could say how I have tried to, or how it sat with me in the room with clients, which in in some ways I guess, and maybe you've encountered this, this idea that it can't be healed is is something that patients don't love to hear. You know, there there they there can be a very, very strong wish to believe that I have the capacity um to help them heal something and get rid of it once and for all. And so it can be really dissatisfying um to sit with me and and say, let's let's stay here, let's, let's, let's be here together and and see what emerges. And it takes um, yeah, it takes it takes something. I I I have my own wish to organize, you know, to look for meaning. And so uh it can be, but but I will say that it there they're very powerful moments that I've had with patients when we can sit together in that space of opacity, I think you would say, where our opacity is acting upon each other and or our conscious is acting upon each other and just seeing uh what emerges.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, when you said patients don't want to hear this, I was thinking analysts don't want to hear this. Of course, in any theoretical discussion, like no analyst in their right mind would say, I'm curing my patient or I'm healing my patient. But it is the case that we imagine, I think mistakenly so, that the best of what we have to offer to a patient is some relief from their symptoms and some possibility of living a life without being tortured by their symptoms. And to connect it with the question you asked me of being asked what to do with these ideas, we were talking about kind of like how people are looking for masters. All of us, I think it's in the human psyche to want closure, to want what La Planche will call the Ptolemaic closure. But another dimension of that is that it is to do that is also to forfeit what is most human and what's most alive about human experience, which doesn't come from knowledge, it comes from being exposed to the glare of something that you don't quite understand about yourself or about the other, while having an experience with the other. This is what Lissanne might call the relation of the poetics of relation. This is what we might think of in the context of what does it mean for your opacity to meet my opacity as opposed to you trying to understand me or trying to grasp where I'm coming from. Something else can happen in that space. So I think patients come in wanting, uh just like many analysts do, to be healed, to feel better, to be cured. But I think that what we have to offer is uh magically different. And I think that it scares us. I think that we are ourselves very scared by how transformative what we can offer in psychoanalytic experience can be. And therefore, we pull back and we forfeit the different kind of space that we can curate, which is which is very, very frightening, I should say. Like one has to be able to go in that space with oneself and with occasion, one has to be able to tolerate horror, to tolerate to tolerate a certain kind of deep knowledge that you do not control your patient, you cannot make your patient's life better. That it's not that if you make the correct interpretation or the right intervention or you do it in in the right in the right timing, that you have a control over whether the patient transitions or whether the patient dates this person or another person, what field they go into. And that is a particular kind of ethical approach, not just in not trying to control the patient by giving them advice, but also in knowing that patients, through their experience in an analytic in a deep analytic treatment, will become transformed and you will have something to do with that transformation. And that's a tremendous responsibility, which you cannot shirk by by doing the right technique or exercising the right judgment. You will always be responsible for what happens out of a patient's treatment, which is not the same thing as to say you're guilty.
SPEAKER_01I was as you were speaking, I was thinking about um moments that I've had with patients where afterwards they've left the consulting room, and I'm I think I feel just stunned. Just moments where you just sit there and it's like, I don't know what happened. I not even trying to understand what happened, but just sitting there and letting it awash over me. And um, and yeah, you cannot um you cannot make those moments happen. And it's hard to not rush to try and excavate some kind of meaning as if it could be excavated once and for all. Um, but just rather to sit with that and um and and and also wait and see what happens next.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. I mean, I would say sit with it, but also allow yourself to be hit by its force, which is not true, which is um because sitting with it can also sometimes have the quality of a certain kind of inertia. And I I certainly do when would when I talk about the estates, I certainly don't mean it this way. Just to give you an example from an immersive um that might um kind of like be a bit more concrete of uh of an explanation of what I mean by that. Um, I did an immersive a few years ago where, and this keeps happening more and more now. People who come to the immersives have read my work, which I'm I'm usually very disappointed by because then people come in with the expectation of what they think I want to happen in the immersive, but I'm learning how to work with that because it's becoming more and more frequent. In any case, uh, in this immersive, a lot of people had read my work, and people had all the right things to say about erotics at the nexus of trauma, about moving towards the wound. They knew the terminology, they seemed to really believe, and I believe that they believed and that they felt it truly, that you know, there's also a self-selection about who comes to this kind of immersive somebody who doesn't like these ideas is just not going to go through the process. Uh, so we talked a lot. There's um in the in the play, I should say there is a lot of race play, especially black partners asking to be racially and sexually humiliated by their white partners. Um, and that is part of what raises all of the uh controversy around the play. So everybody was had good racial politics, was open about thinking about the erotic. And then we read a piece written by um Guy Fisher. Um Guy Fisher was uh a black gay man who died of AIDS in the 80s, and posthumously, his um teacher, who was a Sedgwick, published at his request his diaries. And in one of the essays, he describes a race play scene that is actually not about a black man and a white man. It's between kind of like the way that the uh scene is set up is he's asked to play the role of an Arab boy and the person who is dominating him. It's never quite sure, clear if it's a white person or a white American or an Israeli person. And there's a lot about being stuffed with a kufia and being made to choke and being told during the course of the sexual play. Uh, it's that the piece is written around the time of the first intifada. So there's a lot that's being said about, you know, Arab boys being killed, that this is their fate. So we read this essay, and all of a sudden the whole room changed because everybody was down with a kind of race play that they had seen described in my book. Down, not in a dismissive way, but like having signed on to the idea that race play is some kind of progressive way to go into the political, which is not my opinion, but it is nevertheless easy to draw that conclusion. I I actually think that it's a mess. Race play is a mess, and I'm interested in the mess. But it was only in reading that piece in the midst of the genocide that people were able to reconnect with their sense of confusion and upset about uh the the sorts of things that makes black people watching slave play get up and leave in the middle of it and say, this is just bullshit. I'm not gonna deal with that, this is offensive. So everybody came in with a very good politics, progressive sexual politics, and progressive race politics. But then we encountered this piece and it completely turned everything around. And all of a sudden, the stakes of slave play and the stakes of the immersive completely changed, which is not to say that everybody loved it. Some people really wanted to feel with the experience of I did something really radical. But the radical you don't do something radical, and radical things do you so it was a real shocker for many people to realize how how serious, but also what kind of horrific engagement of the mess this kind of sexual encounters invite and step into. And that itself did something which I hadn't anticipated ahead of time, but which I was very grateful for, which is that even the people who were most pleased with themselves, and I don't say this condescendingly, but the people who came into the immersive and felt, I really understand this, and I'm really with the program, with this program, even those people more than anyone felt the immersive, feeling very confused about why they even came to the immersive or what they got out of the experience. Um, it really scrambled their sense of mastery over the ideas of traumatophilia or over the idea of consent as something that is not something that you can exercise, that also has to do with trauma, that limit consent more so than affirmative consent is how sexuality and for that matter, art and the immersive works. And that to me feels like a much more interesting and promising possibility than somebody learning the theory and knowing how to apply it. And it comes through the disturbance. Do you like does that you see what I mean?
SPEAKER_01I do, I do. I mean, I'm I'm sort of amazed that anybody would come in thinking that they have a full grasp of all of these um ideas because they're so well. I mean, uh let me step back and say in coming to this discussion, I felt in me an internal pressure to want to really understand everything and come to you showing that. Not not performatively, but at least showing you that I can I can engage with you on with these concepts. I've spent a lot of time with them. And the more I worked with it, I felt the more confused I got that there that I knew that if I kept thinking about it, I would just think myself into some sort of state where I wouldn't actually be able to probably talk about much. And so I I and I realized I know I just need to come and have the conversation and be willing to risk what emerges, and you know, that I may not end up liking it. It's possible. Um, but that's an aside. I guess the question um that comes to my mind after you explained all of that was is that a detranslation? Is that an for those for those people? Is that how you would is that a way of thinking about it?
SPEAKER_00That's a very um very interesting thing that you're asking. Um I I like that detranslation came to your mind. Um I don't think that detranslation can happen, can be affected merely by virtue of an intervention. In this case, the intervention was reading this particular text and talking about it. But some interventions, and this is something that Laplange talks about also in relation to the analytic situation, who he which he insists is not about synthesis, but about leases, about things coming undone, such that the patient can redo them differently on their own, rather than the analyst telling them how to redo them. The translation also has to do with uh the particular person and how much they allow themselves to be hit by the force or something, or how quickly they reconstitute into turning it into something they think they understand. Here's what I mean by example. For example, somebody could see this text and say, ah, Sagir Bulu has gone too far. Like this is too much, and it's the genocide. Of course, I would say, what does it mean to be talking about race play between um black bottoms and white tops amidst a time that people, black people are still being killed in the streets and are still being like racial capitalism is kind of like at its apex. But it doesn't matter what I would say. What matters is that somebody could take that moment and completely organizing it through representation, through discourse, including uh, so to speak, progressive discourse or racially aware discourse and organizing it into something that they make them think they understand what just happened, and quickly rebinding it or resisting a detranslation. And this is where we get to what do you do with that? People will do without what they will. It's not for me to control what people do without. So when people walk out of the immersing feeling confused and upset, I do not try to say, Well, this is what happened. Think of the theory, this is the translation, now you get to decide, because then that makes it too intellectual and too theoretical. When in fact, when you're in a moment like this, you're having an experience. So when you said to me, I came into this thinking I couldn't grasp it, like I can't fully grasp the ideas, I want to say that everybody who comes into the immersive tends to be very thoughtful and smart, and nobody comes in feeling, oh, I know what is meant, or I'm confident that I understand everything. But everybody also comes in wanting to be a good person and wanting to be somebody who is going to learn or who is going to um it's going to be revealed to themselves as to others as having good politics. And it is that being wanting to be a good person is is always, I think, part of what the problem is, that it makes it hard to encounter one's own aggression, one's own sadism, and and and one's own confusion or appetite for things that are much better given to you inert in the form of theory, especially like you can say traumatophilia, oh yes, we know what traumatophilia is, rather than feeling them pulsating or vibrating within yourself. So I I don't know what many of the people in that particular immersive did with that moment. And I also don't feel that it's my job or my right to know what they did with it. Like, you know, I I I we do this work, people come to it for whatever reasons of their own, and then things happen, and then people have to decide if they keep working on them or what they mean to them or if they close them down or if they break them down. And, you know, decide here sounds very active and conscious, and of course I don't mean it this way. But each person will do their own thing with that experience, and that that is what we might think of as a traumatism. That LaPfanche describes in relation to traumatophilia in the abricot. I don't try for the traumatism. Whether it will become a traumatism or not really depends on the person or whether it will become quickly reconstituted, as I was saying earlier. But I do try to put things in the immersive both texts and modes of engaging with the play or talking about the play, especially after we've seen it the second time, that have the possibility of breaking something open.
SPEAKER_01As I was reading the book and thinking about it again and thinking about the clinical work, are there ways of and now I'm now I'm mindful of talking to There's no there's no way to not get caught into that.
SPEAKER_00So just why don't you finish your thought and then let's see what you do.
SPEAKER_01Um are there ways of knowing that you are in the presence of um an unbinding or a state of overwhelm? Like how are there ways of telling, I guess is the question.
SPEAKER_00I would say that you you know it in real time. You know that something is happening, whether you would call it detranslating or or coming undone or overwhelm. Like, you know, you might say this was a very fucked up thing that happened, or you may feel this was so confusing, or this was not managed well. So it it really the thing is, it's only in the aftermath of the experience that one will find words for it to organize it into meaning. I think that in the moment it feels like looking at the sun, like directly at the sun without sunglasses. Um but I am curious, and like when you say, when you ask me, do you know it in real time? Do you do you have a sense of what you're uh why why you're asking me that or what you're trying to sort out?
SPEAKER_01I guess I guess part of I'm thinking about a clinical example, um, which uh I think I can I'll I'll I'll tell you a very small part of this um experience that I shared with a patient. So she was somebody who was going through tremendous experiences of loss and succession, and the work between us had gotten quite intense quite quickly, uh, largely because of what she was going through in her external life. It was a real period of intensity. In this period of time, I changed offices. And so when she came to meet me in my new office, she was in this waiting room, and there was a kind of light in the room that was not the kind of light that existed in my old office, which was a very sunny and bright office, and it was this sort of um dusky feeling, which evoked for her this really painful memory. It no, it's not the first time that that lighting had ever taken her into this state that she couldn't really put words to, but that she felt very intensely, very alone in, partly because she couldn't put words to it. And in this moment, she decided. I don't know if she just decided is maybe not the right word, but she came into the room. She didn't, I guess a better way of saying it is that she didn't force herself out of it because she was coming into the contact with another person. She came into the room and um I had a sense that that something was happening. And she sat and we barely spoke for the session, but something really um powerful, I felt that something really powerful was happening, and it also really we've something that we have talked about later many times about a shift that happened for her by being able to have that experience in the room. So that that sort of came to mind when I thought was she in a state of overwhelm.
SPEAKER_00No, I think it's a really important question, a really interesting question. And with the material that you shared, I can say the following. I think it's really hard to know whether this is a moment of overwhelm, because it could be that this dusky light brings up associatively a set of memories or bodily experiences that are inscribed and represented but not accessible. For example, I'm just gonna say this may not be accurate for your patient, but since I don't know your patient and we're doing this as a podcast, I'm just gonna make this up. So that let's say that the patient had some an experience of having been abducted as a child. And that light associates with something about that scene of abduction or where she was kept when she was um kept hostage somewhere. It is entirely possible that this silence is about being flooded either by memories or by thoughts about these memories, or thoughts about, or feelings about what cannot be retrieved around these memories, um, or the contours of sensations that can't be brought into language but are nevertheless filling the room. But all of that could be actually quite consistent with a very bound translated material that is nevertheless not accessible to her. In other words, this may be part of the multiple cascades of sensory phenomena, thought, experience, thoughts, associations, memories, um, assumptions, questions. Was this person there? Why did this person not do this? Do I remember them correctly? Was that their face? Why now? What did we talk about in the previous session? What is my analyst going to make of it? Like all of this could be a big blend. And all of this could be in the interest, like part of a very bound kind of experience, much as the experience is upsetting. In other words, the affect of dysregulation or disturbance that I theorize comes with unbinding. It's hard to use this the feeling of disturbance to say, oh, this is unbinding, because we also get disturbed about things that are very, very bound in our experience. So the effective piece or like the the atmosphere that you so well evoked in your description, like I felt like I could feel it, and there were like the silence that you were describing. It's hard to know if that is in and of itself about unbinding, uh, or whether it is about being in a state like the one I was just describing.
SPEAKER_01Right. And I think part of what I think I hear you say is that um in a way it doesn't matter. Like in the sense that we're not trying, this is not a task that we're trying to accomplish to either provoke unbinding or to be able to accurately identify. It's just more that um cultivating in us a willingness to stay with something that we um may disturb something in us that may um want, may we may feel like we want to look away from um or rush to close up, you know, with meaning, with interpretation.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think more so, I think more so the latter that you just said than the former, in the sense that I do think that our part of our role in the consulting room is to analyze, to to open things up. And opening things up can, you know, the the the patient who has been thinking of their parent in one way, for whom, meaning for whom for the patient, for whom a comment you make or an interpretation you make or a question you ask brushes up against that narrativization and poses attention. And the patient who might actually be struck by that in a way that is both upsetting and dysregulating and then opens something up, might be in the process of unbinding, right? So I I I wouldn't agree that our goal is not it's our role is not to provoke unbinding. Though but my but my word here, my issue here is with the word provoke. Our our work is very much about creating the con conditions for unbinding, and that means putting things in the space that could might have that effect. I mean, that's why it's more about analysis rather than synthesis.
SPEAKER_01Then what comes to my mind is this question of exigent sadism. Right. Mm-hmm. Right.
SPEAKER_00Um yeah, maybe you could you know that's a huge topic, but I'll say I'll say a little bit about this, but I also wanted to go back to the thing that you said later. So it's not that it doesn't matter if somebody is coming undone or if they're just in the same kind of like in the same um cycle of trying to understand their experience that they've always been. Like the patient who comes in and says, um, you know, I was raped when I was a child, and this has caused me to be to have the following features. I become paranoid, I don't trust people in relationships, like I don't want to get close to people, and I don't want to talk about my sexual abuse, has a very, very well-articulated set of parameters around their childhood trauma. And this is why treatment is also always beyond consent. Like you start the treatment hoping that these parameters will shift over the course of the work, and actually we will be working for them to shift. So we don't work within the parameters of consent, we work towards grinding down those boundaries so that it can be opened up to something else. This grinding down those boundaries can to somebody who's not in the process like that sound like sadistic or exploitative, sadistic in the problematic, destructive sense of the world. But I don't mean it this way. Like we talk about boundaries shifting because the relationship is shifting, because trust gets built, or energies get called up in the room that make people interested in going in different directions. But but you also said at the end of your comments, which, and this I couldn't agree with more, is that what does matter is that the analyst does not close up, that in the presence of a dysregulating moment, we do not close it down by, what do I mean by closing it down? I don't just mean saying to somebody, I don't want to hear it, which of course an analyst would never say. The way that we say analytically to our patients, I don't want to hear it, is to assume that we know where it's coming from, to reassure the patient that we know what it means, to to settle ourselves and the disturbance this may cause in us, because it's very upsetting to be with a patient who's dysregulated. It's upsetting, like you feel you can feel anxious about what you should have done differently, you could feel worried about them, uh, you might get dysregulated. So to stay with that rather than try to close it down into an interpretation is is very much what I have in mind when I think about unbinding.
SPEAKER_01Right. And I think I think that that's um what I meant when I said it doesn't matter, in the sense of if I am sitting there trying to think about what is this? Is this this, is it that, then that's me trying to organize myself and maybe that I think that's what I was thinking about when I said that. Then yes, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00And we do that more than more than we realize, and more than we should. We have good good reasons, and I'm putting reasons in quote and good excuses and justifications for ourselves to doing that.
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Yeah, I mean, going back to when I said earlier that um, you know, I have had these moments where I just feel kind of stunned afterwards. It's like stunned in the sense of like like hit, like you said, I guess you I had then said sit with it, but I think I meant um sort of stunned into sitting, in the sense that I couldn't like immediately go and you know, write something or do something. I had to just like let it be there, the the effect on me. I don't know if that makes sense or not.
SPEAKER_00It does, it really does, and letting it be there and the effect on you and feeling that reverberation in you. I was just gonna say reverberation. Yeah, exactly.
SPEAKER_01That's exactly what it what it feels like. I did want to ask if you could speak uh just briefly about exigent sadism and maybe I can just say of this that um I mean it's it's helpful to think about in so many ways, um, but to to make it very um precise in in this particular moment. I will say that um early on in my practice, I noticed in myself a real um challenge in making interpretations that I felt, for lack of a better word, were maybe mean. And it's something that I've really thought a lot about. And what is it in me that um because they don't they're not cruel and you know they're not unkind, but there's something about a certain kind of interpretation that I've I notice in myself a reluctance to make. And um so thinking about exigent sadism has been really helpful, but I I don't know for you how that maps onto interpretations, if at all. And I was just wondering if you could speak about that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. And do you want to say more just to for those who are listening who may not have their own experience as clinicians or may not immediately resonate, though I think a lot of people will. When you say mean, can you say a bit more?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I mean, this is this, it's it is hard for me to put words to. Um that that I am um putting something to somebody that they may not want to see in themselves, um, whether it's something that they're doing in the room or that they're um doing outside the room, that there is something that feels like um I'm in this position with patients where they have allowed me to see um something very intimate and very vulnerable. And and in any way to point out something that they may experience as challenging is mean. And I I can hear, you know, I know this about myself. Like this is something that um, as I said, I have been aware of and work with. And interestingly, in those moments when I make the interpretation, what I often encounter is gratitude, actually. That people are really appreciative uh of the of the thing that I have said. So there's there's stuff about my own history, of course, that that that gets evoked, uh but that just uh something I've been thinking about as I've been reading your work.
SPEAKER_00I think this is such a great question. I really appreciate your your willingness to say something that many of us feel that sometimes the things that we say to patients or we feel like we need to say to patients may feel mean or that in some ways they will hurt them. And that can often hold us back. Um or at a moment where we are ourselves activated can make us unnecessarily cruel. But I would start with saying, you know, generally speaking, educated sadism is a concept that I've been working on. Right now, I'm also thinking about it in the context of thinking politics together with psychoanalysis. And there's there's a lot of work that I'm doing with sadisms of different sorts, like trying to open up the fan of sadisms. But when it comes to the clinical context, I I've been struck with how oftentimes when patients come to see an analyst, like from my experience or my experience supervising, uh for a second analysis, one of the things that tend to come up is the feeling that one has not been pushed by their former analyst. Um, I hear that a lot. It's not uncommon. And one way that I hear that is for one, I think that as psychoanalysts, we have tremendous difficulty working with aggression, um, our aggression and the patient's aggression. Um and to work with aggression. So let's say, for example, just gonna bring very very standard and very kind of like easy, kind of like a straightforward, easy example. Um, let's say that you're working with somebody who comes from a lot of wealth and whose entitlements make it hard for them to be generous to other people or make them stingy, emotionally stingy with others, feeling that they have that they're entitled to certain access that other people are not entitled to. There's going to be a moment, like I think most analysts hope that at some point the patient will see them themselves, will recognize it, and that will be the way in to talk about it. But for some patients will not, either because that's so sclerotic or so they're so heavily defended around it, where at some point you will have to say something about this. Now, you can say something in a cruel way, and you can say something in it in a tactful way, or you can say something, there's a range of how you might bring this up. But there's no question that if you bring it up without avoiding it, there's there's going to be an ouch moment for the patient, unless you bring it up in such a defined way that the patient is like, oh yeah, I know this about myself, isn't like having the wealth, uh, the privilege of wealth so terrible. Like this world is a capitalist world, and then they're off to some generic, kind of like very diffuse uh way of defending out of it. There are some things that are very painful to hear. And there are things about ourselves and there are things about our lives. Like it's very painful for a patient to come to realize that their mother had sacrificed them to their father who was abusing them because she didn't want to lose her husband, or because she was too afraid to be out in the world without kind of like the nuclear family. There's something very cruel about coming to know the truth about one's life, or the truth of, and I'm thinking of how many times patients come to treatment, imagining that a good analysis can protect them from the world. A world of violence, a world of sexism, a world of transphobia. There's nothing you can do, or or or genocide for that matter. There's nothing you can do in the analytic room that will make it a safe world for trans women out there, or for any femininity getting sexually assaulted, or from like the violence that the US is doing in the world right now. And and there's a cruelty, it's a ruthlessness, a kind of harshness that has to be engaged by the analyst to be able to bend her own will, which is to keep the patient safe, to not say something that's going to be very harmful, to not make the patient upset, to not become the bad object. I think that if you're working with exigence sadism, you have to be prepared for earning your position as a bad object. And when I say earning your position, I'm talking about this very seriously because it's not just that you then become the bad guy, it's that you are the bad guy. You're the bad guy who speaks something that is difficult. And you have to take the responsibility for that. This this where Laplanche comes under the rubric of what he calls, uh describes as the transference being provoked by the analyst, meaning that the the analyst does not just regenerate a transference that has to do with a patient's habit of seeing certain people in certain ways. It really re-vivifies in the or vivifies in the consulting room a real relation. So to be working in an exigently sadistic way, you have to be prepared for be to be a bad object. And this doesn't have to be done with meanness or with carelessness or thoughtlessness. And it has to do also with what it means for you two, you as the analyst, being willing to see the ground of your control, recognizing that you two are opaque to yourself. For me, the most uh productive clinical diance, patient and analyst is is between two exigent sadists. Like for me, sadism is not um exigent sadism is not about is not like destructive sadism, where there's a so so to speak complementarity between sadism and masochism. Even that I don't uh subscribe to, but I'll leave that aside for now. Like you need two people who are willing to step into the fire together and who are willing to step into the fray together, not for the one to press the other to understand themselves, but to co-live and be simultaneously present for the disaster, that each of them will register in a different way, and each of them will feel in a different way. This is the place where positionality and social um social position does not actually, even if you're a trans analyst working with a trans patient, there's still dimensions. That do not will not align between you and your patient, including about your transness. So this opacity that is present in each of us is uh is part of what we bring to exigent sadism, like the unknowingness in us. So for me, the most productive work, the most transformative psychic work can meet when say an oxygen sadist meets an exigent sadist, um, which is not about winning or losing or um one person becoming subordinated to the other, it's about taking a risk together. And that risk, having teeth. I'm not talking about the toothless risks of you take a risk because you know it's gonna go well. Um, but if something happening in the consulting room and risking that and signing up for that and for the responsibility that comes with what happens when it doesn't go well, and sometimes it won't.
SPEAKER_01Right. That's that's so helpful and beautifully put. And I and I think for me, I'm I'm I'm okay with being turned into a bad object. I've certainly had that experience. Um, but this idea of earning the role of the bad object, that that is really helpful for me to think about. So thank you for that. I so appreciate you coming today and sharing your thoughts with me. It's been really enjoyable for me.
SPEAKER_00Thank you, Alison. I I also um, you know, I get interviewed a lot, but I don't always talk with people who have read so carefully and also thought so carefully of their own, like my work, and then come in with their own curiosities. Um, so I'm I really appreciated so many of your questions and um and your own willingness to let yourself just think in real time with me.
SPEAKER_01I'm Alison Green, and that's what comes to mind.