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Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, the Editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality award the 2014 Symonds Prize to Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., for her original essay entitled “To Suffer Pleasure: The Shattering of the Ego as the Psychic Labor of Perverse Sexuality.” Saketopoulou is a graduate of the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis at New York University. She is a Contributing Editor, Studies in Gender and Sexuality, and Assistant Editor, Psychoanalytic Dialogues. Working with adults and children, she is currently writing on sexuality, trans, and issues of consent.
Like its predecessors, this eighth Symonds Prize honors a contribution that shows how psychoanalysis can join with other disciplines to illuminate issues core to its process. This reach across boundaries is foundational to Studies in Gender and Sexuality, which breaches divides not only between disciplines but also those fencing off schools of psychoanalytic thought. Saketopoulou, herself interdisciplinary in formation and practice, is one of a younger generation of scholars who increasingly draw on all the heritages psychoanalysis offers.
This essay’s radical thinking bodes well for new psychosexual theory. It digs deep into the field, all the way back to Freud on sexuality and the paradox of pleasure and unpleasure: emphatically, Saketopoulou brings perversion back into the fold of sex and away from its new rendering as a problem of attachment. And she stretches beyond the field’s borders to philosophy and cultural theory for radical views of perversion as creative practice. Pulling these two sets of sources together, she in turn uses “Laplanche’s theory of infantile sexuality to suggest that the sexualization of suffering is developmentally installed in sexuality’s very ontology” (this issue, p. 254).
The ordinary anxiety accompanying sexuality nudges any theory of it toward the normative. This reassuring conservatism means that