Draft:Avgi Saketopoulou

• Comment: Saketopoulou may well be notable but the sourcing doesn't yet demonstrate it. Most references are her own website, podcasts, a Bold Journey profile (a self-submission platform), and the Patreon paywall. Flyingphoenixchips (talk) 03:08, 12 May 2026 (UTC)

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Avgi Saketopoulou
Avgi Saketopoulou in 2024
Education	New York University (Certificate in Psychoanalysis, 2014); Yeshiva University (Doctorate in Clinical Psychology, 2003); Yeshiva University (Master of Arts in General Psychology, 2000); Deree College – The American College of Greece (Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, 1998)
Occupation	Psychoanalyst
Notable work	Gender without Identity (2023); Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023)

Avgi Saketopoulou, born in the late 1970s, is a Greek-Cypriot psychoanalyst and psychotherapist. She is based in New York, where she works as a therapist for people with diverse identities, including trans and queer identities. Saketopoulou has authored two books: Gender Without Identity (together with Ann Pellegrini) and Sexuality Beyond Consent. Her studies have addressed themes such as trauma, consent, sadism, and identity.

Biography

Saketopoulou spent most of her childhood in Nicosia, Cyprus, in a family with both Cypriot and Greek identities.

Studies and professional career

From 1994 to 1998, Saketopoulou studied psychology at Deree College (The American College of Greece) in Athens, completing her studies with a bachelor's degree in psychology. Between 1998 and 2003, Saketopoulou first studied general psychology (earning a master's degree in 2000) and then clinical psychology at the psychology department of Yeshiva University in New York. These studies concluded in 2003 with a doctorate in clinical psychology. In 2003, Saketopoulou began a postdoctoral program at New York University, earning a certificate in psychoanalysis in 2014.

Saketopoulou now works as a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York and is a member of the faculty of NYU’s Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. She has also served on the faculty at the William Allanson White Institute, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, the Mitchell Center, the National Institute for the Psychotherapies, and the Psychoanalytic Center of Philadelphia, as well as the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues, The Psychoanalytic Quarterly ,and Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

Research and writing

Saketopoulou has written texts for a variety of academic publications. This work concerns subjects such as gender and identity, as well as the ambiguous and, according to her, complicated concept of consent. She is critical of Sigmund Freud’s later polarization between a “tamed” eros and a destructive “death drive,” and instead draws greater inspiration from the early Freud’s ideas about a wild and unruly sexuality. Her written work has received several prizes, including the Ruth Stein Prize, the Ralph Roughton Award, the annual JAPA essay prize, and the Symonds prize from Studies in Gender and Sexuality.

In 2023, Saketopoulou and fellow psychoanalyst Ann Pellegrini published the collaborative work Gender Without Identity. Drawing scientific inspiration from Jean Laplanche and his metapsychology, the authors reject the traditional view of gender identity. Instead, the two argue that all individuals acquire their gender, sometimes under the influence of trauma.

Sexuality Beyond Consent and Slave Play

That same year, Saketopoulou published Sexuality Beyond Consent, subtitled “risk, race, traumatophilia.” The idea originated from Saketopoulou’s discovery of and fascination with Jeremy O. Harris’s acclaimed play Slave Play. The play, which began as a school project at Yale University’s drama program, premiered off-Broadway in 2018 before debuting on Broadway the following year and subsequently receiving a record twelve Tony Award nominations for a non-musical play. Saketopoulou interprets both the large number of nominations and the eventual absence of awards as expressions of a broader fascination with uncomfortable ideas surrounding racialized and simultaneously sexualized power. She has reportedly seen all productions of the play multiple times.

Slave Play concerns three interracial couples attempting to treat one partner’s anhedonia through sexually oriented therapy based on raceplay, something that is not initially clear to the audience at the beginning of the play. The play’s boundary-crossing treatment of power-related and sexual themes led Saketopoulou to question enthusiastic consent as the guiding principle for sexual relations. Her book discusses various situations, often uncovered in her own clinical practice, in which people allowed themselves to be surprised and positively overwhelmed by experiences they would not necessarily have asked for.

In the book, Saketopoulou explores the nature of play and its relationship to the unexpected and overwhelming. She further argues that trauma can never be healed in a person, only experienced, and that traumas may remain within a person in a constructive way. Saketopoulou believes that much of psychological practice is shaped by a traumaphobic mindset, against which she proposes a traumatophilic approach. In her critique of enthusiastic consent, which according to Saketopoulou rests on the mistaken belief that a person knows how they will feel and behave in a sexual situation, she coined the term limit consent. According to her, this reflects a more realistic awareness of how people behave in sexual situations.

On sadism

In relation to her studies of consent as a principle, Avgi Saketopoulou has devoted considerable attention to the concept of sadism. She views it as a (potentially) ethical practice and form of caregiving, and she has studied the sadist’s risk-taking in relation to the masochist or submissive in sexual encounters. Saketopoulou has also studied a separate type of sadism that she has described as exigent sadism (“demanding sadism”). She borrowed the term exigent from Jean Laplanche, and according to Saketopoulou, this type of sadism is neither the destructive popular-cultural meaning nor the controlled variant used in BDSM. In 2025, the subject was reportedly planned to be the focus of Saketopoulou’s forthcoming book, tentatively titled The Offer of Sadism.

Other

Saketopoulou, who herself identifies as a “queer dyke,” devotes a large part of her clinical practice to treating people who identify as queer or transgender. Since the publication of the two books Gender Without Identity and Sexuality Beyond Consent, she has frequently appeared on podcasts focused on psychology, relationships, or sexuality.

Saketopoulou has managed the archive of psychoanalyst and author Muriel Dimen since Dimen’s death in 2016, and she is also involved in administering the Muriel Dimen Prize. Dimen likewise devoted much of her own career to the relationship between power and sexuality.

Bibliography

• Saketopoulou, Avgi (2023). Gender without identity. The Unconscious in Translation. ISBN 978-1-4798-3612-3.
• Saketopoulou, Avgi (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. Sexual Cultures. New York University Press. ISBN 978-1-4798-2025-2.