Blackwell Reference Online

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French activist-intellectual Pierre-Félix Guattari was inspired by Jean-Paul Sartre's political sociology and trained as a psychoanalyst by Jacques Lacan. Guattari was internationally recognized for his collaborations with Gilles Deleuze on the capitalism and schizophrenia volumes Anti-Oedipus (1977), A Thousand Plateaus (1987), and What is Philosophy? (1994). In Transversality and Psychoanalysis (1972), Guattari developed his key concept of transversality that became the cornerstone of a new kind of analytic practice he called schizoanalysis. Beginning in 1953, Guattari and his colleague Jean Oury organized the Clinique de la Borde (his workplace for almost 40 years) around a complex, rotating system of tasks and responsibilities that scrambled power relations among staff and patients by having them change roles and take on unfamiliar duties. Called “the grid,” this made possible detailed analyses of relations of power by providing a context in which the institution itself could be exposed, and if necessary modified in a way that encouraged patients to accept new responsibilities and answer new demands within innovative universes of reference. Guattari developed a Sartrean-inflected theory of groups by distinguishing non-absolutely between subject groups that actively explored self-defined projects and subjugated groups that passively received directions; each affected ... log in or subscribe to read full text