We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Avgi Saketopoulou a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Avgi, thank you for being such a positive, uplifting person. We’ve noticed that so many of the successful folks we’ve had the good fortune of connecting with have high levels of optimism and so we’d love to hear about your optimism and where you think it comes from.
At a time that certainty is something many turn to for garnering a sense of optimism, “Sexuality Beyond Consent” turns to things we don’t know and, more specifically, to what we don’t know about ourselves as a source of optimism. That may sound counterintuitive: what does optimism have to do with uncertainty? In my book I flesh out this strange paradox in a way that releases us from the mistaken belief that to be optimistic is to have a sense of what is working to achieve and explain how surprise may have more to do with optimism than predictability and safety do.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
I trained as a clinical psychologist in NY after having moved to the United States from Greece and Cyprus. I subsequently completed training as a psychoanalyst at the New York University Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis.
As part of my academic work, I teach at the NYU PostDoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. I am also on the faculties of several other psychoanalytic institutes, such as the William Alanson White Institute, the Stephen Mitchell Relational Center, and the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, where I offer intersectionally-informed courses on psychosexuality and gender.
I also contribute to my field by publishing my own research; by serving on the editorial boards of several academic journals; by leading study groups; and by supervising colleagues’ clinical work. In October 2021, I co-chaired the inaugural conference “Laplanche in the States: the Sexual and the Cultural”, the first US-based event dedicated to the work of Jean Laplanche (for more information, visit www.laplancheinthestates.com) I am also co-executor of the Muriel Dimen Literary Estate which administers Dr. Dimen’s archive, as well as the Muriel Dimen Prize (through Div 39) and the Muriel Dimen Grant, through NYU Postdoc.
Looking back, what do you think were the three qualities, skills, or areas of knowledge that were most impactful in your journey? What advice do you have for folks who are early in their journey in terms of how they can best develop or improve on these?
The most impactful in my journey -and what has now become the advice I’d give others- is to find mentors, to trust in the time that learning and producing knowledge takes, and to allow yourself to be open to astonishment in the encounter with new ideas, new possibilities, new relational arrangements.
As we end our chat, is there a book you can leave people with that’s been meaningful to you and your development?
I read Mari Cardinal’s “The Words to Say It” as an adolescent and was startled by the intensity of what a therapeutic relationship can look like. It was the book that first made me want to be a psychoanalyst, partly because of the strength of its conviction and its honesty about how anything worth fighting for takes slow time and painful persistence.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.avgisaketopoulou.com
- Instagram: @Avgolis98
- Twitter: @Avgolis
