by Sullivan Oakley, MA

ANNOUNCING 2025-2026 NCSPP INTENSIVE STUDY GROUP INTRODUCTORY EVENT: ON PERVERSION

Sunday, July 20, 2025 | 11 am - 12:30 pm | Zoom
Register for the Introductory Event here
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This introductory event to NCSPP’s year-long Intensive Study Group (ISG) features the course’s four instructors — Janie Riley, Daniel Butler, Michael Levin, and Sydney Tan — each describing their own approach to this year’s theme: On Perversion. The yearlong course explores the provocative and “polymorphous” psychoanalytic concept of perversion and its varied expressions in both clinical practice and the wider cultural sphere. Drawing from classical and contemporary psychoanalytic approaches, we will consider perversion as both an intrapsychic structure and a sociocultural phenomenon, from Freud’s foundational formulations to later reworkings by Lacan, the British Independent group, American Intersubjectivists, and more. We will examine how psychoanalysis has formulated perversion clinically while at times also pathologizing certain forms of desire. Emerging interdisciplinary scholarship reimagining perversion in more nuanced and liberatory terms will enrich our perspective.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact Sullivan Oakley at soakley@wi.edu