Sexual Rapture, Ego Rupture and the Role of Transgression: A Discussion of Megan Rundel’s “The Fire of Eros: Sexuality and the Movement Toward Union”

Abstract

Rundel’s paper explores exciting conceptual links between sexuality and experiences conventionally thought of as mystical. Here she makes the convincing argument that sexuality and orgasm are uniquely equipped to produce experiences of dedifferentiation, which can, in turn, lead to radical psychic transformations. I explore this idea to propose that not all sexualities are equally viable candidates for the evocation of dedifferentiated experiences. Transgression is a vital ingredient to that process, and I explain why I think so. I end with suggesting that we have to approach dedifferentiation with measured excitement, as a topos of instability. What can issue from it are not only productive and transformational dysregulations but also self-destructiveness and, at times, more malignant psychotic fragmentations.

Notes

¹ On this point see also Dimen (1999).

² The interested reader can follow a more fleshed out version of these ideas elsewhere (Saketopoulou, 2014, in press).

³ Rundel persuasively illustrates what this transformation looks like for Noelle. However, she stops short of theorizing how we might understand the nature of these psychic transformations on a more general level.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Avgi Saketopoulou

Avgi Saketopoulou, Psy.D., is on the faculty of the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, the New York Psychoanalytic Institute, and the Stephen Mitchell Center. She serves on the editorial boards of Psychoanalytic Dialogues and Studies in Gender and Sexuality and has received several prizes including the Ruth Stein Prize, the Ralph Roughton award, the JAPA prize and the Symonds Prize. She is in private practice in New York City.