Traumatophilia
A Paraphrase of Avgi Saketopoulou’s Talk at CMPS 03.30.2024
Traumatophilia is the revivification of trauma’s excess energy towards the work of transformation.
In the typical psychoanalytic protocol of trauma—what Avgi refers to as traumatophobia—the site of trauma is returned to through memory and mourning that results in a kind of binding or a limiting of the original trauma in the past. In the clinical setting, the old focus on the “containment” of traumatic material results in an attempt at mastery, a rationalization of the original moment of violence, that is nothing less than the continued malign influence of enlightenment thinking; this containment, as we have explored recently on this blog, can devolve into the self-same vivisections of anatomical science so that the trauma is rebound in a rational process of “encrustation;” the return of the original violence becomes “encysted.” Dr. Saketopoulou makes the plea that psychoanalysis must resist this enlightenment thinking and retain the irrational, the unknown, and the generative nature of the unconscious itself. The notion of making the unconscious conscious is akin to Freud’s weird analogy—and redolent of our environmental catastrophe—of the drying up of the Zuider Zee. This attempted drying up of the oceanic—through rational mastery—is counterproductive to the transformative power of psychoanalysis.
Traumatophilia, on the contrary, acknowledges what spills out of the container, the oceanic force of the (internalized) original violence, and rather than attempting to limit it, would seek to use this excess of unbound energy—which is always present as in a magnetic field—to instead create something new, something unexpected, a transformation. Analysts should be “less precious and more daring” becoming an active participate in this field of “excitatory potential.” And yet Dr. Saketopoulou suggests caution: activating the field of traumatophilia is always a risk…
