You’ve put your finger on a subtle but very important hinge in schizoanalysis: how to translate a concept like transversality—which was first worked out in collective, institutional settings (La Borde clinic, Félix Guattari’s experiments with group dynamics)—into the intimate space of one-to-one psychotherapy. Let’s tease this apart.
1.
Transference vs. Transversality (classical vs. schizoanalytic vectors)
- Transference (psychoanalysis)
- A privileged dyadic relation: the analysand invests the analyst with unconscious significations.
- Repetition and displacement of past object-relations are re-enacted in the analytic frame.
- It has a “vertical” structure: transferential authority flows from the analysand’s unconscious toward the analyst as supposed subject of knowledge.
- Transversality (schizoanalysis / Guattari)
- A collective process: desire flows not just vertically (patient–doctor) or horizontally (peer–peer), but diagonally, cutting across institutional, social, and unconscious boundaries.
- It disrupts rigid hierarchies, destabilizes closed roles, and opens new lines of communication.
- It is less about “repetition” and more about circulation of desire and enunciation across multiple assemblages.
2.
Problem: One-to-one ≠ Group setting
At La Borde, transversality was literally enacted by re-wiring institutional relations (patients taking part in meetings, nurses crossing hierarchical lines, collective decision-making). In the consulting room, you don’t have an institution to “cut across.”
So how can transversality work there?
3.
Ways of Thinking Transversality in the Dyad
- Multiplicity within the “one”
- Even in a dyad, there are many voices, many positions. The analysand brings a multiplicity of unconscious agencies, social scripts, discourses, identifications.
- The therapist, too, is not just an individual but a node of professional institutions, cultural discourses, collective history.
- Transversality in the dyad means opening space for those multiple voices to cut across each other, rather than reducing everything to a single transferential axis.
- De-centering the analyst’s authority
- In classical transference, the analyst holds the “subject supposed to know.”
- A transversal stance is lighter: the therapist lets interpretation circulate, acknowledging the analysand’s creativity, cultural resources, and even non-human actors (objects, technologies, spaces).
- This “polycentric” posture re-introduces group-like circulation into the dyad.
- Connecting the session to other assemblages
- A one-to-one session is never sealed: it is traversed by work life, digital networks, family, politics.
- Inviting those connections explicitly (“How does this symptom resonate with the algorithm that governs your work feed?” / “What voices from your community echo here?”) introduces transversality of contexts.
- Micro-politics of desire
- Transversality, even in dyads, means acknowledging that the therapeutic space is not neutral—it’s a political, economic, institutional node.
- By reflecting with the analysand on those determinations (insurance, diagnostic codes, the “mental health industry”), the dyadic setting itself becomes transversal.
4.
Clinical Example (imagined)
- In a session, a patient speaks of workplace burnout. A transferential reading might focus on displaced paternal authority.
- A transversal intervention would notice how the algorithmic management system in their company scripts subjectivity, and would invite the patient to articulate how their desire is caught in—and might cut across—that machinery.
- The session becomes a node connecting unconscious, workplace, technology, and therapist’s own institutional position.
5.
Summary Formula
- Transference: vertical repetition → subject supposed to know.
- Transversality: diagonal circulation → desire cutting across individuals, institutions, discourses.
👉 In one-to-one psychotherapy, transversality does not vanish; it shifts from being enacted by multiple bodies in a ward to being enacted by multiple agencies within and around the dyad. The task of the schizoanalytic therapist is to hold open those transversal lines, resisting the closure of the dyad into a sealed, hierarchical transferential scene.
Would you like me to sketch a side-by-side schema (columns for “Group setting at La Borde” vs. “One-to-one psychotherapy”) that maps how transversality is enacted differently in each? That might give you a crisp tool for your seminar.
