Introduction to special issue on Deleuze and psychotherapy

The European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling is particularly interested in the implications of European thought for practice. Whilst many continental philosophers have previously regularly appeared, both in this journal over the last 20 odd years and elsewhere, Deleuze is not one of them. Yet he and his frequent co-author Guattari keep tantalising. Perhaps as if we are tempting the devil by going back and dangerously taking another look at that which excites; but, apparent ‘good sense’ tells us to keep at bay.

I am therefore particularly grateful to Manu Bazzano as editor together with the other contributors he has brought together: Pietro Barbetta, Maria Nichterlein, Andrew Seed, and Pamela Whitaker, to entice us, through this EJPC special issue, into exploring the language of these revolutionaries. Manu, in his editorial which follows, introduces us to these authors’ papers.

I am aware that there are many psychotherapists whose trainings do not always equip them to read and rewardingly struggle with such texts. We therefore at the European Journal of Psychotherapy and Counselling require, as is so admirably been carried out by the authors of our refereed papers in this issue, to provide original contributions whilst attempting to make them available to the general reader. However, I thought I would include in this Introduction extracts from my previous co-authored attempt to introduce Deleuze to psychotherapists to further outline the complexities of the very different, and potentially vitally vitalising ideas in this special issue for psychotherapeutic practices.

“Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s main challenge consists in their notion of the ‘anti-Oedipus’ … they argued their radical opposition to the Freudian and Lacanian emphasis on the Oedipus complex and the signifier (Lacan) which in their view restricted ‘the plural libido of madness’ within a narrow family model … Deleuze and Guattari inveighed against the whole Freudian family romance, and set out a new conceptualisation of the polyvalence of human desire: a ‘material psychiatry’ based on the liberation of the flow of desire, which they termed ‘schizo-analysis’.

The philosopher Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Guattari were both steeped in the Lacanian tradition … Both authors drew on the libertarian spirit that had filled Lacan’s teaching, but they were critical of the dogmatism that they saw taking it over as the 1970s advanced.

Their critique of psychoanalysis in general was that it had become a form of social control: it repressed desire through the imposition of Lack, Culture, and Law on the unconscious (Sarup, 1993, p. 94). This view is directly anti-Lacanian; they were against what they saw as the psychoanalytic priesthood, which offered only a mythical Oedipal explanation of desire. Desire is determined for Lacan by lack, guilt, and fear of castration; for Deleuze and Guattari, on the contrary, desire is produced directly from the unconscious which ‘is always mingled with an opposing, reactive desire for repression’, and invites repression because of its revolutionary potential. Furthermore, desire cannot be confined to the family unit; it is ‘a productive feature of political economy’. Taking up the 1960s slogan ‘the personal is political’, they saw libido and the social as inseparable and intersecting … they believed the unconscious is a destructive, political force.

They affirm fluidity and spontaneity, against patriarchal authority and its familial definitions of desire; turning Lacan on his head, they affirm the Imaginary against the Symbolic, which they characterise as tyrannical and dictatorial. There is in the Imaginary and the revolutionary unconscious no distinction between word and deed. Hence, Lacan’s Real is not at all beyond reach: it is what desire realises. Deleuze and Guattari come up with the formulation that combines Marxist and Freudian-Lacanian thought … [:] we are ‘desiring machines’. What ‘desiring machines’ produce is in effect: délire, delirium. Capitalism requires ‘desiring machines who acquiesce to their own slavery’ (Kearney & Rainwater, 1996, p. 403).

The terms ‘schizophrenia’ and ‘paranoia’ are the two polar types of desire which Deleuze and Guattari associate, respectively, with the revolutionary and the fascist. The schizophrenic becomes the model revolutionary because he or she has not been fully Oedipalised … . Sarup paraphrases: ‘it is not enough to fight fascism on the streets; we must also fight it in our heads, setting out revolutionary schizophrenia against our own fascist paranoia’ (Sarup, 1993, p. 93). In Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘schizo-analysis’ children, the primitive, and the mad thus occupy a privileged place in that they are in touch with the power of the pre-Symbolic. Paranoic investment, on the other hand, has its own rewards under capitalism, through the seduction of power, status and money (which leads to the repression of non-conforming desire) (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984).

Real, productive délire is thus schizophrenia based on flight, whereas reactionary desire is based on the authoritarian structure of the hierarchical state, which is echoed in the reductive theory of the Oedipus complex … . They espouse the principle of horizontality inspired by Nietzsche: desire is not defined vertically and Oedipally, in terms of a hierarchy and a lack (negatively), but horizontally, in relation to the society (positively).

Deleuze and Guattari see Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis as an ‘interpreting machine’, with interpretation as impoverishment. Followers of Marx and Freud, they claim, often interpret others’ lives impoverishingly by always returning to a master-code. Deleuze and Guattari are not attacking interpretation per se so long as it is ‘immanent’ rather than ‘transcendent’. In other words, there must be respect for the others’ internal norms, values and complexities, rather than deferral to an external code or value system as the final arbiter. Thus, we would argue, following their thinking, that counselling and psychotherapeutic theories may be of interest in terms of their implications for the client/patient. If they are to be studied with a view to application, then this will lead to transcending the individual, that is deadening individuality in the name of helping … .

Deleuze and Guattari raise further fundamental questions. To what extent is our role to encourage our patients in their ability to seduce and be seduced by power, status and money and to repress non-conforming desire? This is not just a question of opening up their potential for a revolutionary desire – what of the therapist’s own? To what extent should we blank-screen our own desire? Even if we do, how far might we recognise our desire for power, status and money, in our own desire to be therapists? Desire is both in our patients and in ourselves. Where does this leave the notion of having ‘no desire’ (Bion, 1965): does not ‘no desire’ equal a desire for capitalism to go on working? There is an argument (see, for example, Irigary 1985) that to say one is neutral in terms of sexuality is to condone the patriarchal; similarly to claim to be value-free is to make a political choice for capitalism … .

At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari can remind us that therapy is also marginal and subversive – that it can be something to do with revolutionary desire. Or can this, too, be professionalised? In therapy, we can at least help our patients be less afraid of becoming mad. Deleuze and Guattari critique a definition of schizophrenia as a problem related to ego and body-image … . in A Thousand Plateaux (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) … the idea of the ‘body without organs’ … is developed. This is not the organic, Oedipal or hysterical body, with its tell-tale organs, but a body like the social or political body, always in the process of formation and deformation, like desire itself (Lechte, 1994: 104). It exists in a mobile, expansive and horizontal relationship to the collectivity (‘rhizomatic’, to use another of the authors’ terms) rather than in a vertical and hierarchical one to the father and the law”.

(Loewenthal & Snell, 2003, pp. 142–144).

It is the further implications of such ideas for therapeutic practice that Manu and his colleagues develop so intriguingly in this special issue.

As is customary with EJPC Special Issues we also have published respondents and I am very grateful to them for their important contributions. Manos Emmanouil provides the first published response in ‘“Polymorphously Perverse” Lobster of our Attention: a rhizomatic conversation yet not rhizomatic enough’. Our second and final paper ‘Response to Deleuze and Psychotherapy Special Issue’ is from Chris Oakley. In some ways, it might appear that one respondent is saying our previous contributors have not gone far enough and the other is saying they do not realise how far they have gone!

A recent innovation for our Special Issues is to provide related book reviews, and my thanks to:

Daniel Rubenstein for reviewing Anti-Oedipus; Capitalism and Schizophrenia, by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari; Maria Nichterlein for reviewing Schizostructuralism: Divisions in Structure, Temporality, Class, by Daniel Bristow, and, Iain Strong for reviewing Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, by Gilles Deleuze. My further thanks for their invaluable work in preparing this special issue to: Evrinomy Avdi, Julia Cayne, Anastasios Gaitanidis, Jo Gee, Miranda Kersley, Anthony McSherry, Jay Watts, and David Winter.

Finally, I would like to end this introduction with a quote (which was previously used to introduce the above extract) from Deleuze’s frequent co-author, Guattari:

‘The question we must ask is whether the things produced by desire – a dream, an act of love, a realised Utopia – will ever achieve the same value on the social plane as the things produced commercially, such as cars or cooking fat?’

(Guattari, 1977-1984-1977, p. 255).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.