Laboratory of Play:
OCT–7–2026
Psychological Dominatrix Satine Laurent moves swiftly through both worlds. During her commute, she rides alongside the same executives rushing to meetings who, weeks later, may find themselves stumbling across her Instagram presence, requesting to serve her, shedding their authority.
Satine had just come from a four hour session. Her client was seeking transforming by inhabiting something other than his human self. On his preferences form, he noted that he was, “super into puppy play.” Satine came to the scene fully prepared with a dog bowl, tennis ball, and collar. The submissive then embodied a pet. He came to Satine with the intention to adore, and to shut off his thinking mind.
Four hours of worship followed, including a foot rub, play, elements of ritual, and at one point, the two of them joyfully laughing at the absurdity of it all. "I ended up feeling such a genuine adoration for this sub embodying his puppy," she says. "I surprised myself by naturally stepping into that, and how it brought out other archetypes within me.”
This isn’t the scene people typically imagine when they hear the word “dominatrix.” Most of us move through our lives defaulting to a very narrow public perception of what BDSM interactions look like. Something menacing and wildly sexual, drenched in latex; certainly not an environment where catharsis, laughter, tears, healing, and emotional release is at the center.
In that scene, what emerged instead was something that Satine calls the “laboratory of play.”
Satine’s work is deeply rooted in her academic life: a master's degree focused on relational psychology, a thesis on relational safety and trust, and years of study in Jungian psychology, somatics, and Internal Family Systems.
Therapeutic release and integration of the suppressed self is at the core of her work.
Satine’s master’s thesis revolved around the notion of kink as a laboratory for relational dynamics, because “it is a structured environment that offers a set of metaphorical test tubes and ingredients, where you can say, ‘I want a little more of this, a little less of this. This is how we're going to monitor this. We don't know what this experiment is exactly going to entail, but we're here for it.’”
Satine Laurent spent six years a part of the BDSM world before entering it professionally. It all began with a chance invitation to a queer clothing swap at a Los Angeles dungeon, hosted by a woman named Mistress Justine Cross. "I met the most fascinating, interesting, unapologetically themselves humans," Satine says. "At first, I think I expected the experience as something to be pathologized," she admits. "That it was an abnormal sexuality."
What she discovered instead was a beautiful contradiction within herself, a question that she’d spend the next several years answering, first academically, then professionally. "There is a cage in the middle of the room. There are corporal punishment implements hanging from the walls,” she remembers observing, her first time in a dungeon: “Why do I feel so good and relaxed here?"
Her own sexual education, by contrast, offered no such rooms, nor space for contradiction whatsoever. This is something I relate to, growing up in Texas, where “abstinence was the only form of safe sex.” She grew up in the Midwest, in a household where sex was barely acknowledged.
"Sex ed was non-existent," she says. "Did you know you can only have sex after you get married? I don't think things fit before that." And as a queer woman, queerness wasn't even a word in her vocabulary.
Yet, the essence of Satine was already stirring beneath the surface. In third grade, studying Greek mythology, she wanted to be Aphrodite, "because I wanted to be the goddess of sex and beauty."
It's a lineage she traces without a tidy explanation. "Early formative experiences and interpretations of sexuality have a large role in playing out what we're interested in later in life," she says. "Looking back on it now, I'm like: oh, this makes sense."
When Satine told me her bachelor’s degree is in Political Theory, I was instantly struck by the vivid throughline of her academic pursuits. This is a woman who is fascinated by the question of power. Power dynamics apply to her political education, her psychological education, as well as her BDSM education. Studying Political Theory unveiled the power imbalances that were already there, offering a new lens she couldn’t stop applying to gender, race, class, and every ordinary interaction.
Sex and power are the elephants in every room, and Satine’s dungeon is one of the only spaces where power is spoken aloud instead of buried, stirring restlessly beneath the surface.
"This is one space where it's actually named and upfront," she says, “ and that radically changes someone's experience, when we speak the unspeakable. Once we say the elephant out loud, then what happens? Does it disappear, or does it just become beautiful? Does it just become free?"
As Satine stood up and entered her delightfully quaint kitchen and fixed us two glasses of wine, I scanned her apartment. In many ways, it felt like a trim cottage, quiet and peaceful, filled with books and a sense of darling nostalgia. We instantly connected over several things. First, I shared my love of psychosexual film, as we talked about Eyes Wide Shut, Secretary, Blue Velvet, and The Piano Teacher. Then, we bonded over our love for Carl Jung.
My entry point to Jungian psychology was from a different door, but now, Satine and I find ourselves meeting each other in the middle of the glorious Jungian labyrinth. I found Jung through his mystical writings on Synchronicity. From a young age, my life has been punctuated by a series of remarkable occurrences that are far too hyperspecific to be coincidences.
Satine’s work is rooted in Jung's archetypes (The Mother, The Hero, The Shadow, The Wise Old Man/Woman, The Trickster), these symbolic characters that recur across myths, dreams, literature, and our own inner lives, and in the practice of integration, the lifelong process of bringing the hidden or fragmented parts of ourselves into conscious relationship until we become more whole. We meet in our shared fascination with “the erotic unconscious,” the mysterious current of longing, attraction, creativity, fantasy, and psychic energy that shapes who we become, how we move through the world, what we desire, and what we suppress.
She returns with our wine and we lightly ‘cheers’ before dipping back into the corridors of the subconscious.
"So much of the psyche, and what these recurring patterns are and things we continue to see coming up in our lives but don't fully understand, they live, and are sometimes trapped, within the unconscious," she says.
Satine explains that in no way is her work traditional therapy. Her job is not to unearth why a client is the way that they are. "I don't work with the why," she says. "I work with the how: how that comes to fruition now, and how we are working through that actively."
She's far less interested in diagnoses, explanations, or shoving complex dynamics into therapeutic language. Her work is about what unfolds in the room, in real time, when a person is given permission to be someone else, or to finally be no one at all.
French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan explains the mirror stage, the moment an infant first recognizes its own reflection and realizes, that's me. From that moment on, she says, human beings are split between two competing needs: to belong, and to be real.
"If I want food and shelter and love and warmth and belonging, I can't be my real self," she says. "There is often that fracture, early on in childhood, teenage years, very formative memories that we've all experienced." What unfolds in her dungeon is a rare reunification of those two needs at once. "Those scary or ostracized or unwelcome parts of you stay in this room and I am here with you," she says. "That convergence is something that is wild and beautiful to witness."
Before any client sets foot in her space, they fill out an extensive consent and preferences form. This includes medical history, emotional triggers, a full menu of acts and emotional arcs rated on a scale of interest. "Just because you mark something off doesn't mean it's going to happen," she says, "but that gives me a menu of things I can pick and choose from." It's revisited before every single scene.
Once a scene begins, Satine builds it the way a yoga instructor builds a class. "We have the wind-up, then through that class you go through arcs, there's a downfall, you get a little bit of rest," she says. She scores each scene with a custom playlist, tuned to what she wants a client's nervous system to feel at each stage, before bringing them down into an intentional close, an energetic pause, then aftercare, then a return to ordinary conversation.
While sifting through her consent and preferences form, I scan kinks both familiar and unfamiliar to me. Where you have me at Choking, you lose me at “Choking via plastic bag.” Where you have me Blind Folds and Ropes, you lose me at “Mummification.” The sheer thoroughness of the form speaks to the degree of care with which Satine has built in her laboratory of play. I wonder, what is the distance between what people say they want, what they think they want, and what they can actually hold?
Satine tells me that understanding this interplay is critical. One client, she says, "very just like, huge guy, super muscular, sweetheart,” filled out his form with fives and sixes across the board. He said he wanted no limits. He said he wanted to be "absolutely wrecked.”
The night before their first scene, she got an email: Mistress, I promised to be honest. I'm actually really nervous about tomorrow. She replied: Thank God. Because I would be concerned if otherwise, the way you presented yourself.
He showed up shaking. "What have I done?" Satine never took him anywhere near a ten. "When someone says 'no limits,' do not trust that," she says. "Everyone has limits and don't let anyone tell you otherwise."
And yet, in this age of extreme desensitization we all live in, bombarded with chaos and abuses of power every week, it doesn’t surprise me that people long to feel extreme sensations in curated environments. Satine’s work is a diagnosis of the current moment. As technology increasingly dominates our cities, interactions, workflows, rituals, and days, little frictions are smoothed over.
When everything is a climax, nothing is climactic. What is left behind is a remarkably un-sexy life.
There is nothing erotic about fluorescent offices, doomscrolling, or asking ChatGPT for dating advice. So much numbing goes into our consumer behaviors and our behaviors online. That numbing further cuts us off from our subconscious minds, making integration more crucial than ever before. To feel a sense of struggle is to feel alive, desire is aliveness, and sexuality is to be alive. So this all goes hand in hand with the question: how do we feel alive?
Satine calls what people are missing "life force energy.” This is spending time, whether touching grass or getting tied up, feeling entirely embodied. "People feel fucking depleted, and for good reason," she says. In a culture saturated with abuse on the evening news, she sees clients reaching for extremity almost as a corrective, a way of shocking the nervous system back into feeling something at all. It's a dynamic she watches carefully, aware of how easily it could tip into something unhealthy, but she doesn't flinch from naming what she thinks people are actually starving for underneath it: to be seen, to be heard, to be loved. "It's not radical, it's not revolutionary," she says. "It's basic humanity."
Where kink is now, psychedelics were 10 years ago. Satine believes that one decade from now, kink therapy will be as widely understood as ketamine therapy is today. She'd like conversations about her field to move past pathology entirely, and she thinks that shift is already underway.
Over the summer, her sessions took her all around the world, to Berlin and Vienna and wherever her work calls. When I ask what she feels particularly excited about, it’s obvious that she is rich in “life force energy,” excited about her clients, her scene work, her practice, and her infinitely expanding well of psychological knowledge.
Satine is motivated to continue growing her social media, where she works closely with her photographer David Matthew Friedman, and together, they shape the evolving identity of Satine. She credits her first photoshoot with Dave as a turning point. “I’ve always found the domme aesthetic beautiful: a woman in power. But I felt like it wasn’t truly integrated, like I could really walk around with my shoulders back and feel embodied, until I started becoming Satine,” she shares. “From that first photoshoot with Dave, I instantly locked in. I realized that this is what I am meant to be doing.”
Now, the wine had gone warm in our hands. Somehow the night had slipped away, and though we'd wandered through childhood, fear, desire, power, and fantasy, I could still feel entire landscapes left uncovered.
No one ever said the terrain of the erotic unconscious would be easy or smooth. Jung himself once wrote, "I would rather be whole than good." In Satine's dungeon, people roam zigzaggedly searching for their wholeness, embodiment, and integration.
To belong and to be real.