Pleasure Principles: Reflections on Saketopoulou’s “To Suffer Pleasure”

Abstract

In this essay I elaborate some of the seminal ideas in Saketopoulou’s article ‘To Suffer Pleasure,” contrast them to Foucault’s notion of technologies of the self, and consider the uses of psychic work and physical pleasure. I highlight the importance Saketopoulou makes of a corporeal solution to intergenerational conflicts and consider ego shattering as a site of encounter: with the limits of signification in the body and its emergence at the edge of the social.

Notes

¹ Deviation is at the very heart of Laplanche’s theorizing—both in the ways Freud “goes astray,” by repeatedly eschewing the radical dimension of his discoveries, and in the postulate that the sexual drive itself is a radical deviation from the biological instinct (see J. Fletcher’s excellent introduction in Laplanche, 1999).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Francisco J. González

Francisco J. González, M.D., is a graduate analyst of the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, where he serves on the faculty. He is an assistant editor of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and contributing editor of Studies in Gender and Sexuality. He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, and consultation in San Francisco and Oakland.