On Traumatophilia and its Discontents: Avgi Saketopoulou, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (New York:  New York University Press, 2023;  272 pp.)

Is this journal, Psychoanalysis and History, the right platform for reviewing Avgi Saketopoulou's intriguing new book Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia? The book is an original psychoanalytic intervention into questions of sexuality, consent and the role of the therapist in approaching trauma. But what about history? Can Saketopoulou's suggestion that we all should be more ‘traumatophilic’ rather than ‘traumatophobic’ provide us with a new lens for understanding the traumatic history of fascism, colonialism and the impact of inequality – a history that goes sometimes hundreds and hundreds of years back? The premise of the book is that ‘the impact of traumatic experiences cannot be eliminated or repaired: at best, we live in their aftermath on different terms than when they were inflicted on us. Relinquishing the idea that trauma can be repaired opens paths to thinking about what subjects do with their trauma’ (p. 2). Therefore, Saketopoulou, a clinical psychoanalyst and theorist, invites the reader – and her profession too – to ponder ‘what one may do with trauma as opposed to what one may do about trauma (i.e., resolve, heal, overcome, cure)’ (p. 114). The fantasy that many therapists and patients share together of becoming again the person who was there before the ‘traumatic’ event is counterproductive, and therefore, she argues, the desire to heal a patient from a trauma should be replaced by the curiosity to get to know the new subject that

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