Deleuze and Psychology

Philosophical Provocations to Psychological Practices

Maria Nichterlein, John Morss

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317584674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Deconstruction in Philosophy

An increasing number of scholars, students and practitioners of psychology are becoming intrigued by the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and of Felix Guattari. This book aims to be a critical introduction to these ideas, which have so much to offer psychology in terms of new directions as well as critique.

Deleuze was one of the most prominent philosophers of the 20th century and a figure whose ideas are increasingly influential throughout the humanities and social sciences. His work, particularly his collaborations with psychoanalyst Guattari, focused on the articulation of a philosophy of difference. Rejecting mainstream continental philosophy just as much as the orthodox analytical metaphysics of the English-speaking world, Deleuze proposed a positive and passionate alternative, bursting at the seams with new concepts and new transformations.

This book overviews the philosophical contribution of Deleuze including the project he developed with Guattari. It goes on to explore the application of these ideas in three major dimensions of psychology: its unit of analysis, its method and its applications to the clinic.

Deleuze and Psychology will be of interest to students and scholars of psychology and those interested in continental philosophy, as well as psychological practitioners and therapists.

PART I Reading Deleuze psychologically

1 A WALK IN THE PARK

DOI: 10.4324/9781315741949-1

In 1972, Gilles Deleuze and his friend Félix Guattari published Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. This is how the book starts: A beginning like this is designed to shock and, getting on for fifty years later, it still does. Those five-letter words grab our attention. But what does it mean? As it turns out, that question indicates the answer. ‘What does “it” mean?’ For, as the title of the book states it, one of the main targets of Anti-Oedipus is Freud’s account of human mental life, with its representation of subconscious forces as ‘the it’: literally thus in the original German (das Es). This term was turned into the even more impressive-looking Latin form ‘Id’ – still capitalised – by Freud’s English translators.

It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks. What a mistake to have ever said the id.

Like in the 1950s science fiction movie Forbidden Planet, Deleuze and his henchman Guattari are taking on ‘Monsters from the Id’. There are no monsters, they say; there is no id. There is no such ‘thing’. Instead of a thing or things, there are flows and connections: connections of production, of consumption, of desire and of ecology. Not ‘it’ but ‘machines’. For Deleuze and Guattari, ‘Everywhere it is machines.’ The syntax is a little unconventional but we can figure out what they are driving at if we just keep reading: They started their years of collaboration in 1969, the year after the shock of student-led protests and strikes in Paris. Perhaps, then, it is not surprising that their style is direct and provocative. Anti-Oedipus became an instant best-seller in France, where it was acclaimed as the book that best articulated the new sensibilities emerging out of May’68 (Colebrook, 2002b, p. xvii).

Everywhere it is machines – real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessary couplings and connections. … Hence we are all handymen: each with his little machines. … A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch. A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. … There is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring-machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.

Deleuze and Guattari, 1983, pp. 1–2

Turbulent times

The events of May’68 had a significant impact on Deleuze. As he himself recalled, he was one of the first students to defend his thesis after the revolt, a situation that gave rise to some comic relief, for his professors were more concerned about possible attacks by gangs than in evaluating his work (Boutang, 2012). On a more serious note, however, May’68 marked a significant rupture in French social and political life. Together with similar events elsewhere in Europe, especially West Germany as it then was, it affected the Western world in general. It shaped the spirit of the thinkers of that generation in what came to be known as ‘French thought’ (Roudinesco, 2008). As Colebrook points out (2002b, p. xxxiii), these were examples of human events that escaped the rationalities and definitions ascribed from all directions, expressing unexpected and uncontrollable forces. What made May’68 such a critical event for Deleuze was its ‘unexpected puissance’, its force in cutting through the established order, a disruption that afforded the creation of a space of possibility; a space that escaped descriptions and expectations. The student demonstrations began as protests against the Vietnam War, in solidarity with protest movements in the USA and elsewhere. But May’68 was neither planned nor controlled … it happened; and its happening left all ideological mindsets speechless (Deleuze and Guattari, 1984). For Deleuze, May’68 was an example of how reality cuts through the ideologies showing the limits of language and of the attempt to make sense of novel events in terms of established structures and institutions.

Deleuze saw in May’68 a unique moment of life, an event, a moment where a collective intensity engaged people politically and created an event of significance, a rupture with the status quo that gave birth to the genuine possibility of change and newness. For Deleuze this was people – as a collective – reaching their limits and engaging in active protest, in a clamour of having ‘had enough’. It was people alive in their gesture of discontent.

The emergence of a critical manifesto

Anti-Oedipus put together a manifesto of protest against the conceptual evils of modern life. Deleuze and Guattari’s was an ambitious critique that is best grasped by recalling its subtitle: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Anti-Oedipus attempted to capture the force of the event of May’68 by articulating the salient elements of this protest and working out the critical implications to constructively inform not just French but Western sensibilities. The critique was carried out by means of an exploration of the strengths and limitations of the two prevalent analytical frameworks of that era – Marxism and psychoanalysis. Deleuze and Guattari juxtaposed an analysis of Marx’s conceptualisations on the flow of capital and on the conditions of production together with Freud’s proposal of the existence of an unconscious and of an economy of desire or libido. Appropriating Nietzsche’s ideas on the will to power, Deleuze and Guattari affirmed a material reading of reality and of our human activity as, fundamentally, a social production. Reality is no longer a representation of a specific point within a historical process of liberation but the creative expression that results from or emerges out of processes of production. In turn, production is not a proletarian activity in the way that Marx had described, but the expression of unconscious desires. Reality for Deleuze and Guattari is a delirium, a creative articulation of what is better described as ‘a schizophrenic out for a walk’ rather than ‘a neurotic lying on the couch’. Not a passive introspection, isolated from the world, but an active and constructive engagement with the world, a getting out among it. Importantly, this engagement constructs what Deleuze and Guattari would later call ‘assemblages’, mobile structures that in turn co-produce one’s sense of one’s self – as a subject with consciousness – and the sense of a world, and that world itself.

In relation to the discipline of psychology, the major critique presented by Deleuze and Guattari is, as the title indicates, against psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis, they suggest, is the only true force to be reckoned with in psychology, a kind of back-handed compliment to its power. In Anti-Oedipus they portray psychoanalysis as, ultimately, fulfilling a constraining role within the broader framework of capitalism. Capitalism restrains the flow of capital by alienating production, especially by means of the creation of (artificial) ownership. In a complementary way psychoanalysis, they claim, undermines the promises of its discovery of the unconscious by reducing its potential and denying its true nature. Deleuze and Guattari accuse psychoanalysis of a ‘reduction of the factories of the unconscious to a piece of theater [sic]’ (Deleuze, 1995, p. 17), Oedipus or Hamlet; the reduction of the social investments of libido to domestic investments, and the projection of desire back onto domestic coordinates (Deleuze et al., 1972).

Deleuze and Guattari articulate an alternative proposal: rather than psychoanalysis, ‘schizoanalysis’. Rather than a neurotic lying on the couch of the psychoanalyst revisiting – endlessly so – the past familial dynamics, a schizophrenic walking in the park encountering and making connections with the outside in an attempt to break free from the binds inherent to the human condition. Schizoanalysis attempts not to unveil the true dynamics of an unconscious searching for ‘mummies and daddies’ but to articulate the machinations and the trajectories of what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘desiring machines’ in their explorations of the circumstances of contemporary life. We will return to these issues throughout this book.

Anti-Oedipus marked the beginning of a new metaphysics, a metaphysics that would respond to the insights of science in the twentieth century as noted by Todd May (2005). This is particularly of relevance to psychology because, as Adkins clarifies in relation to A Thousand Plateaus, theirs is a metaphysics but not an ontology. ‘It is an experimental, pragmatic metaphysics that replaces ontology’s “to be” with a series generated by the conjunction “and … and … and …” ’ (2015, p. 24). Deleuze and Guattari’s project is indeed a forceful critique of the established tenets of the West, tenets they saw embodied in a philosophy based on representation and identity. But it is much more than that. Their project was not merely negative but also an affirmative proposal that would become more fully articulated in the companion volume to Anti-Oedipus, written eight years later, A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). This critically positive element in Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas makes them particularly interesting for our discipline.

Developments that took place between these collaborative volumes also include the move from a vocabulary of ‘desiring machines’ to a vocabulary of ‘assemblages’ and what might cautiously be called a maturing of the style of presentation. But before we focus on the developments emerging in their project, there is value in noting the complexity of interplay between Deleuze’s solo work and his collaborations with Guattari. There is little doubt that the collaborations between Deleuze and Guattari were unique and intensely creative and that, although Deleuze became more recognised, Guattari provided some significant contributions to their collaborative work (Lecercle, 2002, pp. 33–6). In many ways, their collaboration confirmed the coherence of their ideas of an actual relational knowledge in practice. Many have commented on the uniqueness of their friendship and how they complemented each other, to the extent that some see it as misleading to think of the work of the one without that of the other (Dosse, 2010). Deleuze himself commented on the complementary styles of himself and Guattari, a complementarity that would afford the creation of a third entity that was not simply an aggregate of the two but an emerging new persona (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006; Deleuze et al., 1988). Not that the two writers lost their distinctiveness from each other. As Deleuze commented, they ‘were never in the same rhythm, [they] were always out of step’ (Deleuze and Parnet, 2006, p. 13). Guattari remarked that ‘we’re really not of the same dimension … [Deleuze] always has the oeuvre in mind’ (2006, p. 400). This difference can in part be accounted for by the fact that by the time Deleuze started his collaboration with Guattari, he was an experienced writer and teacher of academic philosophy. By the time he met Guattari, he had published ten books and numerous articles on the key thinkers and ideas that informed his philosophical investigations. Guattari, on the other hand, had established himself as a major psychoanalytic practitioner in the Lacanian tradition.

Understanding Deleuze's philosophical project

In a sense, and in some ways pre-empting the insights of A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze’s oeuvre can be best described as ‘conceptualizations within a plateau’. Deleuze and Guattari borrowed the concept of plateau from Gregory Bateson to refer to a ‘continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’ (1987, p. 22). Bateson’s concept of a plateau (1958) helps us to focus on two central characteristics of Deleuze’s work. In the first instance, and as Paul Patton has noted, Deleuze ‘is an experimental thinker committed to a conception of movement in thought’ (2010, p. 10). If anything is fixed in Deleuze’s conceptual work, it is the centrality of difference and variation in all aspects of life, including conceptual work. Reading Deleuze requires the acceptance that all of his concepts carry with them a field of resonances and indeterminacy. It is hard to pin down his concepts to specific definitions not because he lacks precision but because, in line with his own insights, concepts suffer variations through time when they engage in material encounters with the outside. Like Deleuze and Guattari’s central concept of assemblages, Deleuzian concepts are not static but in movement. Here lies a second fundamental commitment of Deleuze’s work: to engage with philosophy in ways that are vitalist, that is to say directly informed by life. In the context of these ‘constraints’, it can be correctly stated that Deleuze’s writing can be best understood as ‘always on the move’.

Such movement needs to be understood as multidirectional. Perhaps it can be best thought of as a kind of landscape, an extension of sorts or, using an idea Deleuze and Guattari would often use, as ‘establishing a territory’. Here lies a difference from the works of other great thinkers which can be reduced to lineal trajectories. Such trajectories may be chronological or might be thought of as representing a logical sequence with a straightforward structure. In contrast, Deleuze constantly calls us to engage with the whole – to see the landscape, in all its particulars. He invites us to see the forest while walking amidst the tall trees. There is something in the style of Deleuze’s writing that always reminds us that there is a much larger picture at stake, a larger machine of which the particulars in question are but cogs. This is demanding and something that many have described as daunting. But such a territory – such a machine, such an assemblage – can be seen as demarcated by a number of defining coordinates. As May (2005) and others (e.g. Dosse, 2010) have commented, there are two main coordinates in Deleuze’s work. The first is empiricism as a foundational methodology. The second is a trinitarian genealogy of philosophy through the work of Spinoza, Nietzsche and Bergson. These will be our bearings in this introductory exploration of Deleuze’s work.

Empiricism_ the opening of concepts to life

The term empiricism is familiar to those who have studied psychology in the English-speaking world. It connotes an openness to the world in all its sensory complexity and relatedly a respect for experimentation, for trying things out. Empiricism stands in opposition to dogmatic insistence on the validity of views imposed by those in positions of authority. All these characteristics are relevant to Deleuze’s version of empiricism. But by comparison with Deleuze, the conventional understanding of empiricism in psychology is somewhat timid. We will come back to psychologist’s timidity in the next chapters, focusing at this point instead on how Deleuze used the term.

Empiricism and Subjectivity (1991) was Deleuze’s first book, the beginning of what was to become a life-long engagement with empiricism as methodology. As Deleuze states, empiricism constituted a continuous and central orientation in his work (1995, p. 89). What attracted him to empiricism was that, as a method, it ‘sets out to present concepts directly’ (Deleuze and Maggiori, 1986, pp. 88–9), thus engaging with raw concepts ...