Deleuze and Guattari (1983) dissect the value of psychoanalysis in the social and political skape of their time. The two thinkers look at how psychoanalysis had become a tool of the elite. They invoked Marxist critique of the field by stating how it had mirrored capitalist production. “Hence, instead of participating in an undertaking that will bring about genuine liberation, psychoanalysis is taking part in the work of bourgeois repression at its most far-reaching level, that is to say, keeping European humanity harnessed to the yoke of daddy-mommy and making no effort to do away with this problem once and for all” (50). Ultimately, the two thinkers underline the problematic history and undertaking of psychoanalysis with a critique of its relation to ongoing social, political, and economic violence. Below are useful quotes for understanding their arguments:
14 - “We cannot say that psychoanalysis is very innovative in this respect: it continues to ask its questions and develop its interpretations from the depths of the Oedipal triangle as its basic perspective, even though today it is acutely aware that this frame of reference is not at all adequate to explain so-called psychotic phenomena.”
17 - “We must examine how this synthesis is formed or how the subject is produced. Our point of departure was the opposition between desiring-machines and the body without organs. The repulsion of these machines, as found in the paranoiac machine of primary repression, gave way to an attraction in the miraculating machin.”
33 - “Capitalism tends toward a threshold of decoding that will destroy the socius in order to make it a body without organs and unleash the flows of desire on this body as a deterritorialized field. Is it correct to say that in this sense schizophrenia is the product of the capitalist machine, as manic-depression and paranoia are the product of the despotic machine, and hysteria the product of the territorial machine?”
34 - 35 - “And if materialist psychiatry may be defined as the psychiatry that introduces the concept of production into consideration of the problem of desire, it cannot avoid posing in eschatological terms the problem of the ultimate relationship between the analytic machine, the revolutionary machine, and desiring-machines.”
Questions: Why was schizophrenia so central to Guattari and Deleuze’s book? Why is schizophrenia such a fascinating base for thinking through psychoanalysis? What inspired this book and what were the socio-political and academic stimuli? Why did the two find Marxist thinking so relevant for thinking through psychoanalysis? What was foreclosed in their intense focus on mainstream psychoanalysis and capitalism?
