29 Weeks | September 5, 2025 – April 17, 2026
Fridays | 10:00 am – 12:00 pm

On Perversion

Turning Towards and Away:
A Psychoanalytic Inquiry Into Perversity
Janie Riley, LMFT
September 5, 12, 19, 26; October 3, 10, 17, 24, 2025

Perversity turns human relating on its head: Instead of people coming together to develop structures of mutual care, relationships become a field of impending confusion. Perversity portends to pursue a desirable goal, but its method is curiously intent on its own destruction, as well as the destruction of those in its path. Or, it demands homeostasis over uncertainty, aiming for a familiar “stability” even if that means remaining stuck in endless repetitions. But where does perversity take root? Is it an intrapsychic or a sociocultural phenomenon? What are the conditions in which such a phenomenon arises? Psychoanalysis can help address these questions, though in our field’s history, our theories have fomented perverse elements in society rather than countered them. Over the last few decades, thinkers and writers have shifted their focus away from discussions of perversion, instead turning toward more equitable and expansive ways of understanding the human condition. More recently, many have revisited the subject with a new sensibility, reinterpreting classic theories of perversity with fresh perspectives. In this class, we will draw on both the old and the new to explore how we can serve ourselves, our patients, and our communities, even when the change we seek seems impossible to achieve.

Surging Disquiet:
Perversion Now
Daniel G. Butler, Ph.D., LMFT
October 31; November 7, 14, 21; December 5, 12, 19, 2025; January 2, 2026

This course explores the creative and destructive potential of perversion from clinical, philosophical, and metapsychological perspectives. Rather than condemn or romanticize perverse phenomena, we’ll consider perversion’s multiple, often contradictory effects on psychic, social, and political life. Although we primarily turn to authors in or adjacent to psychoanalysis, interdisciplinary scholarship will (hopefully) enrich and (certainly) problematize our clinical inquiry into this historically fraught topic. Readings span multiple psychoanalytic schools, including French Psychosomatics (De M’Uzan, McDougal), British Independents (Khan, Bollas), American Intersubjectivists (e.g., Benjamin, Stein), and the principal seduction theorists (Freud, Ferenczi, Laplanche). We may discuss philosophers such as Bataille, Fanon, Foucault, and Klossowski, as well as theorists of fascism (Fromm, Reich, Theweleit), sexuality Bersani, Berlant, Edelman), and antiblackness (Farley, Sharpe, Marriott).

Where Reality Was, There Infantile Pleasure Shall Be:
Perversion as Pathological Defiance
Michael Levin, Psy.D.
January 16, 23; February 6, 13, 20, 27; March 6, 13, 2026

This course will explore a psychoanalytic understanding of perversion, focusing first on the foundations of psychoanalytic metapsychological theories of perversion in Freud’s work, and then on their extension in the work of Grunberger, Bollas, and Stein. The latter will also offer opportunities to study the application of psychoanalytic theory to the understanding of perverse social and political formations and their functioning.

Lacan’s Oedipal Reading of Perversion:
The Knotting of Imaginary and Symbolic Registers
Sydney Tan, Psy.D.
March 20, 27; April 3, 10, 17, 2026

In Seminar IV, Lacan poses the question of the phallus's status and theorizes perversion in relation to the imaginary and symbolic phallus. Seeking to extract perversion from the problematic of the drive — the commonly held idea that perversion has to do with a fixation of the partial drive that was not sufficiently elaborated upon or accidentally arrested — Lacan understands perversion solely through the organization and articulation of the Oedipus complex. Situated within the field of the pre-Oedipal, within the realm in which the imaginary function is predominant, perversion is not a form of psychic structure, but a supplementation to psychosis. In this section, we will utilize the three logical, yet also chronological, moments of Oedipus to examine the interweaving of the imaginary and symbolic registers and explore where perversion fits within this framework.