Like all classes, this class will become a group. Groups are strange creatures, rife with unconscious dynamics, liable to draw powerful feelings and strange behavior out of members. They are also key vehicles for political change and social support, and are totally inescapable, even in an atomized society: “No individual, however isolated in time and space, can be regarded as outside a group or lacking in active manifestations of group psychology,” writes psychoanalyst W. R. Bion. In this class, we will ask and begin to answer the question: what kind of group is this class? What is it like for us to form a collective in the midst of our respective weekly routines, to spend time together at this particular historical moment, and then to dissolve back into the city? We will borrow methods and paradigms from psychoanalysis, performance studies, management theory, systems psychodynamics, and more to understand our own dynamics. In each class session, we will have an experience together, and then debrief that experience in seminar-style discussion. It will likely be fun, scary, confusing, heartbreaking, angering, pleasurable, uncomfortable, awkward, and maybe even revelatory. It is first and foremost a collective experiment.
Applications due September 18th.
About the instructor:
Lily Scherlis is a writer, artist, and PhD candidate in English and Theater and Performance Studies at the University of Chicago, as well as a member of Groups Group, a small collective exploring group dynamics in social movements. She has written for Harper’s, Parapraxis, and The Drift; her piece about group relations and left political work appeared in n+1 in 2025. Her first book, People Skills, is under contract with Liveright/W.W. Norton.