TO SUFFER PLEASURE: TRANSGRESSIVE SEX

The Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute is sponsoring a presentation by Avgi Saketopoulou, Ph.D, that will be discussed afterwards by Howard Levine, MD.  The title is “To Suffer Pleasure: On Transgressive Sexuality’s Potential to Evoke Unrepresented Mental States.”  I take transgressive sexuality to be that which is heightened in intensity and possibly distorted in nature by strangeness, forbiddenness, pain, drugs, and extreme intensity.  These things seem to be highly valued in our society, at least among those who have the freedom and resources to indulge them on purpose.  But often they are imposed on children or others who did not invite the experience, such as war or prison rape, destroying mind and spirit as much as body.

These are quotes from the announcement.  I added the bolding.

Transgressive sexuality operates within an economical regime of escalating excitations, pushing against the limit of what is tolerable. Its insatiable appetite for intensified stimulation can lead to a welling up of pleasure to the point of pain or exhaustion producing pleasure that is suffered. Such suffering of pleasure can override homeostatic controls and, at its apex, may result in a shattering of the ego (Bersani).”

“This shattering, I will propose, behaves like a portal that allows unrepresented experiential fragments to leap forward. These embodied bits are akin to Bion's beta elements: insofar as they have evaded representation they cannot be thought with or thought about. By nature impossible to gather into language, they arrive as sensuous bodily states.”

It would be possible to consider this subject in terms of S/M practices, but I am more interested in the idea of a “portal” and previously “unrepresented experiential fragments” arriving without any words to describe them.  “Bion’s beta elements” appear to be pre-verbal concepts, maybe connected to the sorting centers that are being discovered in the structure of the brain.  They are recorded by the senses but never defined enough for symbolization in words.  One wonders whether they could be explored with images, music, dance, and so on.  Wouldn’t that help to reunite the shattered pieces of the ego?

But also, there is a circle in that persons with “unrepresented experiential fragments” floating in their minds are bound to go looking for extreme experiences, searching for that portal in hopes of more pieces or maybe wanting to shove unwanted feelings back in.  There might be a sensation of incompleteness.  Is that a “sensuous bodily state”?