[it really starts to get good at the 6 minute mark…]
Transversality was to replace transferrence. Why the replacement? Transference works by provoking change through coerced dialogue between analyst-patient. The patient, one-on-one, stuck in a room with nothing but the psychiatric gaze and the ambience of the room, has few options outside the give-and-take channeled through “the talking cure.” Compelled speech generates content that the analyst uses to place the patient on a psychoanalytic grid that charts out various structural positions. Is the patient a hysteric? Then the analyst must evacuate the position of the Big Other. The bottom line: the analyst is to induce the patient into clarifying their Subject position so a diagnosis and adequate counter-reaction be applied. The trouble is that this only works for neurotics – meaning slips for psychotics, preventing the analyst who holds meaning to get any traction.
“So long as people remain stuck on themselves, they only see themselves.” Maybe it’s society that’s sick, not you. (And who doesn’t have nightmares about the sterility of hospitals and clinics?) Why not crack the window and open the door to change to let in a little fresh air? End the vertical hierarchy of the analyst-patient dyad. Particularize institutional transfer by making everything a group, a club, or a tribe, and give it a name to establish a process that trumps it. That process? The transversality of the group. The faster and stronger the connections are made to the outside world, the greater the motion, and the higher the coefficient of transversality. You’d be surprised at how quickly you ‘get over yourself’ when the focus shifts outward.
Anarchist Without Content 