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Working Clinically with Overwhelm: The Cost and Growth-Inducing Possibilities of Undoing the Self - Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD (Webinar live online)
2025-26 Friday Night Guest Lecture Series
Continuing Education information to follow
This presentation begins with a summary of the theory of overwhelm, a way of conceptualizing working with intensity and excitation that is not about guarding the self (not about emotional regulation, not about protecting the ego from the drives) but which explores what becomes possible when one reaches the limit of what is bearable in oneself, when one follows the exigency of the unconscious. For the clinician, working with overwhelm is both a challenge and an art form: it requires us, as therapists, to make ourselves permeable to our patients in ways that make us exquisitely vulnerable and to take true risks the results of which cannot be guaranteed ahead of time.
To illustrate the difficulty, but also the extraordinary possibilities of such work, work that rends the self to allow something new to emerge, Dr. Saketopoulou will discuss the analysis of a Jewish patient whose encounter with the Palestinian genocide raised considerable anxieties and revived questions of identity, trauma, and intergenerational transmission. The clinical work–and the presentation–raise questions of ethics, of rethinking questions of intergenerational transmission and the debts it incurs, and the relation of the political to the psychic.
Target Audience
______ Introductory ______ Intermediate __x____ Advanced
Learning Objectives
Participants will be able to explain the concept of overwhelm and its clinical utility
Participants will be able to discuss what detranslation means and why that is clinically useful.
Participants will be able to list some of the generative potentials of overwhelm.
Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD, is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst practicing in NY, and on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her publications have received numerous prizes including twice the annual prize of the Journal of the American Psychoanalytic Association (in 2014 and 2023), the Ralph Roughton Award, the Symonds Prize, and Div39's Scholarship Award. Her interview on psychoanalysis is in the permanent holdings of the Freud Museum (Vienna) and in 2021 she co-chaired the first US-based conference on the work of Jean Laplanche. In her monograph, Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023), she braids psychoanalysis with performance studies, philosophy, and queer of color critique to explore the vicissitudes of overwhelm and repetition. She is co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity, which includes a re-worked version of the essay for which they received the IPA’s First Tiresias Prize and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the wake of Jean Laplanche. She is currently working on her next book manuscript provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism: Overwhelm, Crisis, Possibility.
Austen Riggs Center Inc. adheres to the ACCME’s Standards for Integrity and Independence in Accredited Continuing Medical Education. All those at Austen Riggs Center involved in the planning of this activity, including the presenter(s) listed above, report they have no relevant financial relationships with an ineligible company*.
The views and opinions expressed in this presentation are those of the presenter(s) and do not necessarily represent the official policy or position of the Austen Riggs Center.
* An ineligible company is any entity whose primary business is producing, marketing, selling, re-selling, or distributing healthcare products used by or on patients.
Available Credit
- 1.50 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™
ACCME - As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc. designates this learning activity for a maximum of 1.50 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
- 1.50 APA
As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc. designates this learning activity for 1.50 continuing education credit(s) (CE) for psychology. Continuing Education (CE) credits for psychologists are provided through the co-sponsorship of the American Psychological Association (APA) Office of Continuing Education in Psychology (CEP). The APA CEP Office maintains responsibility for the content of the programs.
Austen Riggs Center, Inc. is recognized by the New York State Education Department’s State Board for Psychology as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed psychologists #PSY-0115.
- 1.50 ASWB-ACE
As a Jointly Accredited Organization, The Austen Riggs Center, Inc is approved to offer social work continuing education by the Association of Social Work Boards (ASWB) Approved Continuing Education (ACE) program. Organization, not individual courses, are approved under this program. State and provincial regulatory boards have the final authority to determine whether an individual course may be accepted for continuing education credit. Austen Riggs Center maintains responsibility for this. Social workers completing this will receive 1.50 continuing education credit(s).
Austen Riggs Center, Inc is recognized by the New York State Education Department's State Board for Social Work as an approved provider of continuing education for licensed social workers #SW-0843.
- 1.50 Contact Hours/ ParticipationA certificate of attendance for all Learners.