Back to the question of translation though this time the text is encumbered by a move from the German original. Freud’s Oedipal trinity is of the “es/it,” the “Ich/I,” and the “Uber-Ich/Over-I.” While his English translators introduced the “id,” “ego,” and “super ego,” their French cousins remained closer to the original with the “ça,” “moi,” and “surmoi.” It is interesting that the translators of Anti-Oedipus chose to comply with the English Freud instead of the French Deleuze and Guattari. “I,” “me,” and “ego” are the choices they alternate for the single word “moi” (often, it seems, without rhyme or reason). Perhaps it was their attempt to bring closer to their audiences a text that sounded strange enough already!
Mine is not simply a linguistic concern since Freud had used the term “Ich” to refer at times to the self in its totality and at others to an agency or a part of that self. While it makes his text difficult to read, Freud’s equivocation also suggests that the two senses are co-dependent, that, in fact, one could not speak of a self, of an I, without that part, an ego, that negotiates between the demands of desire, reality, and the Law, that, in other words, and for Freud at least, to speak of a self is to speak of Oedipus. (To speak of a self, for Lacan, is to speak of and to insist on not only the necessity of the symbolic Law but also the unavoidability of a specular and imaginary “moi” without which the entire structure would also flounder.) Much like his predecessors (Kraepelin, Bleuler, and Binswanger), Freud relied on the “ego,” or its absence, to understand the schizophrenic, or at the very least to understand the schizophrenic as beyond psychoanalytic comprehension, and hence intervention.
To be fair to Freud, in a manner of speaking, and to also be more accurate, conceptually and clinically, it is not on the “ego/moi” that the possibility of therapeutic psychoanalysis hinges. Rather, it is the capacity for object libido, which is to say for the love of an other, that Freud looked for in his prospective analysands. This is not an insignificant distinction. In classic psychoanalytic terms, the I that is capable of love is an I that has already been Oedipalised; it is an I that has passed from ego libido to object libido, from secondary narcissism to the super ego (via the ego ideal). The narcissist, the masochist, the homosexual, the schizophrenic, the woman, in sum anything that is not “Freud,” these are all quite capable of uttering an “I” but theirs has not been fixed enough by its relationship to the familial axes of Oedipus for it to be curable. It is in its endorsement of this non-Oedipal “I/moi” that Deleuze and Guattari’s schizophrenic process is to be distinguished from both Lacanism and Ego psychology. The only “real” relationship—be it of love, hate, or what not—is a relationship of production, of desiring production, of the production of the unconscious. Though he claimed all the names of history, Nietzsche, obviously, did not fail to utter an “I” whenever he fancied it or it suited his purposes. Similarly, the handyman has rarely hesitated to acknowledge an “I fixed it” even though his primary mode is of fixing things rather than of claiming for himself the things he has fixed.
