THE PSYCHOANALYTIC FIELD

Anti- … … …

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Condensation, Conjunctive Synthesis, Connective Synthesis, Deleuze, Disjunctive Synthesis, Displacement, Freud, Guattari, Klein, Lacan, Machines, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Secondary Revision, Speaking Desire, Subjects by Fadi Abou-Rihan on March 3, 2008

        One of the most striking qualities of the Deleuze-Guattarian schema is its trinitarian structure: production, recording, and consumption; machine, body without organs, and subject; paranoid, miraculating, and celibate; connective, disjunctive, and conjunctive; and, finally, delirium, hallucination, and experience.

        The question that presents itself at this point is whether such a schema is but the latest in a series of vignettes that articulate the fundamental processes of thought (primary and secondary) Freud and Lacan had already attempted. Are we, in other words, witnessing a departure or simply a reiteration, no matter how varied, of what has been said and done, analytically and otherwise, on numerous occasions already?

        Deleuze and Guattari’s response is that the triangulations of social delirium, be they Oedipal or symbolic, are inherently static and stultifying; their forceful insistence on immutability and universality has now become drone-like and quasi-hypnotic. The schema that Deleuze and Guattari offer instead is grounded in a logic of counter-stability; its structure may be tripartite but, and forever, its modalities are infinite, its meanings multiple, and its subjects aleatory.

        I want to backtrack a bit here: what Freud had posited as his most cruicial contribution to the study of the psyche was not the fact of the unconscious. Freud had posited the fact of a dynamic unconscious as a form of thought and a process, as in primary process, as the basis for his newly elaborated project. I think that as much as Anti-Oedipus marks itself as profoundly anti-psychoanalytic, it remains most faithful to Freud’s core insights. In the name of flows and machines, the text rejects the Freudian unconscious in favour of an unconscious governed by three productive syntheses: connection, disjunction, and conjunction. However, with structural linguistics and its Lacanian appropriations for background, Deleuze and Guattari have essentially recast the Freudian mechanisms of displacement, condensation, and secondary revision in terms that, though unsettling, are no less psychoanalytic:

  • displacement, circulation along the axis of contiguity-metonymy, is now the connective synthesis (and… and…);
  • condensation, circulation along the axis of selection-metaphor, is now the disjunctive synthesis (either… or… or…)
  • secondary revision, the arrangement of disparate fragments into commonsensical and identitarian narratives, is now the conjunctive synthesis (so that’s what it is…).

        Deleuze and Guattari identify a psychoanalytic implementation that can only tolerate a “this and that” (mummy and daddy), a “this or that” (masculine or feminine), and a permanent “it’s me” ego. Deleuze and Guattari advance a schizoanalytic implementation where the connections and the disjunctions operate ad-infinitum and the subjectivities to which conjunctions give rise are partial and transitory.

        The anti-Oedipal criticism can be reformulated in the following terms: psychoanalysis has erected unnecessary and institutionally self-serving limits; it has betrayed its own first principle of a dynamic unconscious. It has not gone as far as it can actually go. Guattari stated as much in his notes while preparing the text. In the recently published Ecrits pour l’Anti-Oedipe, he repeatedly admonished Freud and Lacan for reintroducing the subject into the very realm from which they had previously evicted it, for subordinating the unconscious to the logic of unity and coherence, if not in fact then in therapeutic ideal. For Guattari, psychoanalysis has proven itself incapable of tolerating its own discovery of the unconscious as a primary process; it has become little more than an ossified and ossifying secondary revision.

        I want to suggest that, in adopting the notions of slip and dynamic primary process, Anti-Oedipus belongs at the heart of the psychoanalytic tradition. That it rejects the Oedipal schema in which Freud encapsulated his findings makes it less Freudian but not any the less psychoanalytic. Before and since Deleuze and Guattari, many in the Kleinian and relational camps have rejected the Oedipal drama as a major hermeneutic key. This did not make them any the less psychoanalytic; it confirmed their commitment to the study of the psyche and to the intervention in its workings. Deleuze and Guattari’s failure to separate the discipline from some of its practitioners may be due to the fact that, sadly, the discipline itself has been governed by doctrinaire allegiances to those prominent amongst the practitioners. One often hears certain Freudians, Kleinians, or Lacanians declaring only members of their schools as the “true” bearers of the psychoanalytic torch; outsiders are dismissed as lost souls or impostors.

PS: see also Anti.

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Subjects-Insights

Posted in Anti-Oedipus, Associations, Conjunctive Synthesis, Deleuze, Guattari, Insight, MetaTherapeutics, Productions, Reflexivity, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects by Fadi Abou-Rihan on January 20, 2008

        One of the main controversies in the history of the psychoanalytic movement has coalesced around the meaning and relevance of insight as a clinical category. A divide has often separated a more classic epistemic orientation from a concern for the analysand’s affective well being which, supposedly, may or may not have much to do with the making conscious of conflicts and/or deficits. Through the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis, Deleuze and Guattari are effectively redefining insight and in the process rearranging the terms if not the relevance of the debate here. The conjunctive synthesis is ostensibly a “so that’s what it is!” moment of insight and a clarity identified by its effect to reorganize radically not only delirium (thought) but hallucination (perception) and intensity (experience) as well. The “so that’s what it is!” is not so much a revelation or an uncovering of the subject to itself but the making of a subject. Instead of simply eliciting in the analysand a greater sense of subjective responsibility, or a greater capacity to tolerate anxiety and its ambivalence, or even a broader affective vocabulary or repertoire, the conjunctive synthesis is quasi traumatic in its quality for it is the signpost of a radical shift in the subject’s thought, perception, and experience, which is to say in the subject’s way of deploying itself for itself and for others. Insight is that rare moment of tremor in the clinical situation that marks for both analyst and analysand a transformation, not only in understanding but also in being and in relating. However, and whereas the trauma (of war or abuse for instance) dissociates the subject from its experiences, thoughts, and perceptions, and in so doing robs it of its agility and ossifies it, insight, analytic or otherwise, multiplies the connections between the components; it produces new recordings, experiences, subjectivities; it makes such multiplications and productions tolerable.

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Subjects-2

Posted in AO-Mistranslations, Anti-Oedipus, Conjunctive Synthesis, Deleuze, Freud, Guattari, Lacan, Machines, Productions, Schizoanalysis, Speaking Desire, Subjects by Fadi Abou-Rihan on January 15, 2008

        In Lacanian psychoanalysis, the psychoanalysis with which Deleuze and Guattari were most suffused, jouissance has come to hold pride of place amongst the categories and constructs. Jouissance is neither pleasure nor enjoyment (this is yet another one of those distinctions the translators seem to have completely missed); it is what goes beyond either of these two states. Pleasure, for Lacan and for Freud before him, is a minimum of excitation and its principle is to have as little pleasure as possible, to maintain, at whatever cost, the integrity and stability of its subject. Jouissance is what motivates a striving and a going beyond the limits of the pleasure principle, a transgression, a seeking out of more pleasure and hence, and in the process, an endurance of pain. Jouissance is that paradoxical pleasure that one derives from the symptom, or the gain from the illness as Freud would think it. Put differently, and whereas pleasure and enjoyment confirm the autonomy and integrity of the subject as ego, jouissance undermines that ego’s search for balance and control; it presses upon it, it disrupts its sanctum. Rather than the guarantor of a subject’s unity and organisation, jouissance is its destabilizer.

        Interestingly enough, and in order to make the identical claim, Deleuze and Guattari choose to invoke the authority of Marx on this matter (16).

        What of the subject then? If the relations between body without organs and desiring machines are of attraction and repulsion, of miraculating and paranoid machines, the relation between the latter two is of a consuming and celibate machine whose jouissance, “sexual pleasure,” “volupté,” is the motor force behind the conjunctive (it’s me and so it’s mine…) synthesis.

        Crucial here is the difference in the language-word: whereas the “celibate” evokes constraints and denials, the “célibataire” (the bachelor) is a playful suitor, as with Duchamps, hovering on the border between the respectable and the unknown, and hence suspect, that is forever produced as a new alliance between the paranoid and the miraculating, between desiring machines and the body without organs.

        In this “celibate” machine the paranoid and the miraculating reconcile, which is not to say that they cancel each other out. Both persist, but this time alongside a degree of voluptuousness, a creativity of what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as states or zones of intensity.

        Hallucinations and deliriums are secondary to the experience of such zones: Schreber’s “I experience myself becoming a woman” is projected as a hallucination “I see my reflection in the mirror as a woman” and introjected as a delirium “I think I am a woman.” (I am choosing to render the French “je sens” as “I experience” instead of “I feel” in order to A) underscore the physicality of the Deleuzo-Guattarian usage and hence B) to distinguish it from the current obsession with “feeling” and “affect” in certain psychotherapeutic circles).

        This is where the I is located, as the outcome of a state and an intensity, of the lived experience of having breasts, for instance, which does not resemble having breasts (19).

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