Is this a real opposition? Or isn’t the latter the generalization of the former (the latter’s reduction, i.e. a fixation on one of the things that it does)? After all, reproduction is also work, right?

When you describe the unconscious as something that works, even as you seem to eschew the term “reproduction” to refer to what the unconscious does, do you find the term “production” (Deleuze and Guattari’s term) acceptable? Or is even that–i.e. looking at the unconscious as something that works, as something that has to work, something that has to do something–rather than just being a complex, incomprehensible space of ineffable desires–also “capitalistic”? That is to say, does it fall into the dominant discourse? Does it make of psychoanalysis a Royal science preserving the current State of things?

Industrial work is characterized by repetition of tightly structured rational procedures. Intellectual workers are charged with constructing these repetitive routines — of constructing routines that are rational, organized, systematic, conscious. It seems to me that sychoanalysis wants to loosen these conscious routines and structures by letting the unconscious inject more free play into the self-system. I’m suggesting that, in giving the analysand permission to play, the analyst counters the rationalized work culture and the rationalized worker who plugs into this culture like part of the machinery. The analysand becomes increasingly able to “play with himself”: to become an agent who dismantles the machinery, putting the pieces back together in ways that are less efficiently productive and more exploratory.

The economic parallels become fairly obvious here and many have drawn them to attack psychoanalysis as a privilege that only the few can afford and the even fewer still can use.

I don’t agree with that view. In my own clinical experience I have found that the assembly line worker is no more and no less likely to use analysis than the designer or enterpreneur.

The standard Guattari once identified for psychoanalysis makes a lot of sense to me: it “should simply give you a boost of virtuosity, like a pianist, for certain difficulties. It should give you more freedom, more humor, more willingness to jump from one scale of reference to another” (“So What”, 14). I think we could all use some of that “virtuosity.”

For most jobs work is characterized by repetition; the worker is ” trapped in the most monotonous and debilitating of cyclical scenarios.” Accordingly, would it be better to think of the unconscious as more akin to play? At the higher strata of the economy there are jobs which do pay people to dream, fantasize, think, compromise, etc. Might not the argument be made that, to the extent that it frees up the workings of the unconscious, psychoanalysis is a tool that’s particularly valuable to people who occupy the upper strata of the workforce — designers, managers, entrepreneurs, marketers, analysts?