by Intensive Study Group Committee (ISG)

2025-2026 YEARLONG INTENSIVE STUDY GROUP: ON PERVERSION

Fridays, September 5, 2025 — April 17, 2026 | 10:00 am - 12:00 pm | In-person
Access Institute, 110 Gough St., Suite 301, San Francisco
Learn more about the course or register now.
Faculty: Janie Riley, LMFT; Daniel Butler, Ph.D., LMFT; Michael Levin, Psy.D.; Sydney Tan, Psy.D.

This yearlong course explores the provocative and “polymorphous” psychoanalytic topic of perversion and its manifestations in clinical and cultural life. Drawing on classical and contemporary approaches, we will trace the evolution of perversion from Freud’s metapsychology to its reworkings by Bollas, Stein, and Grunberger, attending to how psychoanalysis has pathologized certain desires. Clinically, we’ll examine perversion’s creative-destructive potential across multiple traditions, including French psychoanalysis, the British Independent school, and American intersubjectivism. Interdisciplinary texts by Foucault, Bataille, Bersani, and Sharpe will deepen our inquiry. The course culminates in a close study of Lacan’s structural reading of perversion and its contradictions.