Child Colloquium Series

Puberty as threshold; psychoanalytic reflections on trans adolescence and hormone blockers.
Avgi Saketopoulou

Trans childhood, with its implications for our understanding of gender overall, is one of the most urgent issues that psychoanalysis is called upon to theorize at this moment. Conversion-adjacent approaches generate moral panics, arguing that children are too psychically immature or too traumatized for their requests for hormone blockers to be seriously considered. Given that adolescence is a period of identity exploration, these models argue, it is safer to engage children in psychotherapeutic interventions and delay medical care, such as puberty blockers. But this antinomy (therapy vs. medical care) does not just introduce a false dichotomy; it also oversimplifies our understanding of puberty. While as psychoanalysts we are attuned to the turmoils accompanying puberty, rarely do we think about what puberty means for adults, what it rouses in them, and how that, in turns, impacts children.

Discussing material drawn from her analytic work with a trans girl that has spanned more than ten years, Dr. Saketopoulou will suggest that a child’s puberty is a crisis time for the adult. Relying on Jean Laplanche’s intervention regarding infantile sexuality, primal seduction, and the distinction he articulates between the instinct and the drive, she will explain why children’s puberties awaken a variety of psychodynamic issues in parents – and sometimes in the adults who treat them, as well. Detailed clinical process will help illustrate these points and will encourage us to consider the complex psychic entanglements that arise around children’s requests for hormonal interventions.

Avgi Saketopoulou, PsyD, is a Cypriot and Greek psychoanalyst based in NY and on faculty at the NYU Postdoctoral Program in Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis. Her work has received twice the annual JAPA prize (2014 and 2023), the Ralph Roughton Award, the Ruth Stein Prize, and the Symonds Prize and she is co-recipient of the IPA’s First Tiresias Prize. 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. She is author of Sexuality Beyond Consent: Risk, Race, Traumatophilia (2023); co-author, with Ann Pellegrini, of Gender Without Identity; and in critical conversation with Dominique Scarfone in The Reality of the Message: Psychoanalysis in the Wake of Jean Laplanche. In 2025 she was appointed the Avenali Chair for the Humanities at Berkeley University. In the same year, she co-founded and launched the Psychoanalytic Hub for Online Liberatory Education (P-HOLE). She is currently working on her next book project provisionally titled The Offer of Sadism: Laplanche and the Politics of Resistance.

Kristin Fiorella, PsyD, MFT, is a psychoanalyst in private practice in San Francisco where she sees children, adolescents and adults. Her published writings on the dialogue between Buddhism and psychoanalysis have received various awards. She is the editor of the book “Child and Adolescent Psychoanalysis in Times of Crisis: War, Pandemic, and Climate Change” and is on the faculties of PINC and SFCP.