Expanding On the Containing Function of kink

Natalia BÁEZ-POWELL

Paper presented at the Sexuality and Sex Post-Sexual Violence: How BDSM, Kink, and Sex can function as Aftercare session of Division 39 2024 Conference, Washington, DC.

Multiple authors differentiate the types of sadism and its intent, unconscious motives, and manifest behaviors (Grossman, 2015; Saketopoulou, 2023), usually as a potential means to control, destroy, or gain mastery over others (Grossman, 2015), “simulated violence” with limited risk to the participants for the “interest of pleasure production” (Saketopoulou, 2023, p. 173), and an “aggressive component of the sexual instinct” (as cited in Grossman, 2015) as defined by Freud. Reflecting on my previous clinical experiences as an early career professional in the wake of Saketopoulou’s (2023) book and this year’s Division 39 Conference, it has never been clearer the need for her naming of “exigent sadism,” in its pointed, seemingly cruel, pain where both parties take risks, are impacted, and remain attuned in their care and support. It provided an opportunity to write a paper, “On the containing function of kink,” where I outlined two cases where BDSM was a part of my clients’ lives and became the container for myself as the clinician. This approach helped me tolerate projections of violence[1] and helped me step into a seemingly necessary sadistic role in the face of extensive sexual assault and relational trauma histories. Through this avenue, I wished to speak more specifically to sadism that may present itself in the therapeutic encounter with survivors of sexual trauma, who may more readily pick up on the sadistic elements of therapy and who may need to relate to the therapist in these ways as a mechanism of working through—or better yet—working in the circulation of trauma.

Without Saketopoulou (2023), I find that there is limited room within our field for kink and trauma to coexist without being pathologized. Her work provided me a way to understand being called “sadistic” in therapy while resisting shame, and offers more understanding of the sadistic roles I have had to take up as a clinician, often working within various forms of trauma: I began to understand these clinical encounters as an expression of my going beyond these clients’ limits and our work putting trauma back in circulation for new opportunities of narration and reclamation. Using language aligned with Saketopoulou’s (2023) writing, clients might have experienced me as “transgressive” where the “experiential excess” contributed to the “subjects feeling overwhelmed enough” for something new to occur (pg. 33); in other words, I had gone deeper than what they had imagined consenting to in treatment. Promoting safety or providing translational tools in this context becomes hindering: if I try to reinforce safety or my own interpretation of narration in the therapy room, it might collapse what the client has allowed and risked into circulation, even if it feels violent. However, potentially allowing the space to continue feeling unsafe without containment may have pushed me and/or my clients beyond the limits of being able to remain present with the realities of violence or potential traumatic rupture. Centering BDSM, with its built-in infrastructure and potential parallel to the therapeutic encounter, could allow me to shift from perpetrator enacting pain in a way that dehumanizes and traumatizes its subjects into the role of a more ethical and responsible sadist, which we may find in kink scenes that maintain awareness, degrees of safety, and rely on boundaries within the encounter. From this standpoint, I have understood myself in the role of sadist as a caring, committed, and aware participant in a position of power in the face of someone suffering as they process, repeat, or engage in an overwhelming, disorganizing state of painful exploration. However, with my identities rooted in collectivistic cultures, internalized socialization around my identities, and my own history of previous harm, this positionality also created many opportunities for alarm, fear, paranoia, and risk in contending with the potential and liability of harming others—just some of the degrees of risk I experienced as a participant in these therapeutic encounters. Saketopoulou (2023) has therefore filled a wish, a need, and a longing for this theoretical approach throughout my work, where she invites us to question, after sexual trauma, can sex and pleasure be just “for the sake of experience alone” (p. 140), what is the role and myth of healing and repair, what are the limits of affirmative consent, and what do we as clinicians have to risk of ourselves?

Our field teaches us specific strategies to support others in their experiences of trauma, but it often shies away from our personal human experiences, perpetuates silence, and over-pathologizes various forms of trauma, which renders it unspeakable amongst its clinicians regardless of what we may know of the statistical truths. There are such mixed messages of what it means to be a “helper,” “healing,” and “healthy,” and an expectation to uphold “discretion” to outperform stereotypes around trauma and avoid the possibility of riskily being identified in this way as “other,” marked by trauma. Not only does this silence across our field serve and parallel systemic silence, protecting folks in positions of power in a predominantly White field to continue harming individually or globally the communities that we see and are a part of, but it also denies the origins of psychoanalysis and its radical beginnings. At a much larger scale, it is this type of violent silence, restrictive and punishing, that we are seeing with Palestine. Saketopoulou’s (2023) work is significant when considering what we have to risk being in therapeutic relationships and in community with others, not only taking up what risk may look like but also the implications that internalization of systemic oppression resides in our egos rather than our unconscious. If we are unwilling to risk parts of ourselves or look away from the site of the trauma, we are intentionally abandoning our communities to continued, relentless violence and being the ones to risk it all, including their careers, education, wellbeing, and lives.

As clinicians, we cannot speak about experiences of violence, dehumanization, trauma, and risk-taking without mentioning our current global political situation and the atrocities in Palestine, Haiti, Congo, Sudan, Indigenous lands, and other settleroccupied lands. For the last ten months, we have been relentlessly exposed to violence and trauma, and it is time to allow our egos to shatter[2] and reclaim the reality of these experiences that continue to be denied and suppressed (at a professional, individual, and collective level). This includes a shattering of our idealized expectations of government/governance that stifles our fight and our voices that punishes liberation and that uses incarceration as a means of suppression. We cannot look away from the history and current brutality of American imperialism, settler colonialism, genocide, and political imprisonment. We need a psychoanalysis that continues to grow and expand to capture the realities of lived experience, particularly to dismantle systems, do away with the expectation of neutrality, and disrupt safety behind apolitical statements. As I have written previously,

Sigmund Freud himself is not independent of oppression and social justice; however, psychoanalysis, as we know it now, shifted its gaze away after World War II, becoming “increasingly classist, White, sexist, and anti-LGBTQ…[excluding its] origin in racial, sexual, and gendered tensions inherent in Freud himself” (Gaztambide, 2020, p. 84).

Can we, then, engage in what Martín-Baró called recovery of historical memory to reclaim the histori- cal memory of psychoanalysis and liberation psychology that may be lost as a result of trauma (Gaztambide, 2020, p. 72)?

Because when theorizing is linked to a process of “self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice… Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” (hooks, 1994, p. 61). I am not arguing for rejecting any dominant theory but rather in line with Martín-Baró’s ideas of “repurposing existing psychology and, where necessary, correcting and augmenting it…creating something radically new and different… from the accumulated knowledge” (Burton & Guzzo, 2020, p. 26).

So let us look at the reality of American imperialism, settler colonialism, violence and trauma, the impact of capitalism and White supremacy on governance and across identi- ties, and many of the other realities of lived experience. Let us risk the ego of psychoanalysis and put the trauma caused by our community and theories into circulation, even if we must look to other disciplines to help tolerate the risk, the transgressiveness, and the pain. If not, let us contend with what is left of psychoanalysis when we look away, when we do not risk the interpretation of the silence or the leaving of the room, when we ignore the conflict or the defense. We have committed to sit with people in their suffering, in recollection of the worst days of their lives, in the reality of lived experience, the injustice, the mourning, and the pain—psychoanalysis is not silence.

References

Báez-Powell, N. (2023, April). Untitled. Paper presented at the Difficult Conversations: Holding the Both/And of Oppression and Character Dynamics session of Division 39 2023 Conference, New York.

Báez-Powell, N. (2024, April). On the containing function of kink. Paper presented at the Sexuality and Sex Post-Sexual Violence: How BDSM, Kink, and Sex can function as Aftercare session of Division 39 2024 Conference, Washington, DC.

Burton, M. & Guzzo, R. (2020). Liberation Psychology: Origins and Development. In L. Comas-Díaz & E. Torres Rivera (Eds.), Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice (pp. 17–40). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Gaztambide, D. (2020). From Freud to Fanon to Freire: Psychoanalysis as a Liberation Method.

In L. Comas-Díaz & E. Torres Rivera (Eds.), Liberation Psychology: Theory, Method, Practice, and Social Justice (pp. 71-90). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Grossman, L. (2015). The Object-Preserving Function of Sadomasochism. The Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 84, 643-664. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1002/psaq.12023 hooks, b. (1994). Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York: Routledge.

Saketopoulou, A. (2023). Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia. New York: New York University Press.

Endnotes

1. Case examples were provided during the panel (Session Title: Sexuality & Sex post sexual violence: how BDSM, kink, and sex can function as aftercare of the self) of instances where clients have called me an “emotional sadist” or “perpetrator,” synonymous in these instances with deriving pleasure from the very clear emotional pain they were experiencing while in session.

2. In reference to Saketopoulou (2023), when describing the necessity of the “breaking open of the ego…[as to] animate the ego toward new translating work” (p. 54) and in service of disrupting internalized White supremacy

Contributor

Natalia Báez-Powell, Psy.D (she/her/ella) is a queer, Latinx, licensed clinical psychologist working in private practice in the United States. Her work in decolonial, relational psychodynamic therapy with young adults focuses on issues of relationships, identity development, racial and sexual trauma, and immigration. Dr. Báez-Powell is passionate about social justice, seeking to make therapy and training more accessible across populations and language accessibility. She received the 2023 Early Career Practitioner Award from Division 29, the Society for the Advancement of Psychotherapy. Her previous publications center on the impact of identity and systemic oppression on supervision, training, and clinical work.