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Through the generosity of the Alexandra and Martin Symonds Foundation, the Editors of Studies in Gender and Sexuality award the 2017 Symonds Prize for an outstanding article in the area of sexuality and gender to Ofra Eshel for “Beyond Sexuality, Beyond Perversion: The Annihilated Last Scream.” Eshel is faculty, training and supervising analyst of the Israel Psychoanalytic Society and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association; cofounder, former coordinator, and faculty of the Program of Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy for Advanced Psychotherapists at the Israel Psychoanalytic Institute and of the Israel Winnicott Center; and on the Advisory Board of the International Winnicott Association. She is in private practice in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Studies in Gender and Sexuality supports inquiry that explores beyond conventional interpretive frameworks and disciplinary checkpoints with an ear open for the unheard. Here, Eshel describes agreeing to work with a patient in whose “perversion,” unsettling to other clinicians, she hears a call for t(w)ogetherness in recovering and reliving traumatic early experience. In work that takes them “beyond sexuality, beyond perversion” to where, exactly, neither of them can predict, we hear a not-so-often-told story of the harrowing challenge to analytic stamina and faith that can ensue when following patients into territory where the road leads to abyss and breakdown, psychic deadness and despair. Eshel finds in Bion, Eigen, and Winnicott, among others, compatriots in listening for what has been nearly extinguished but might still burn.