In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The Little Hans Assemblage
  • Ian Buchanan

1. Anti-Interpretation

There is no straightforward way to say to what schizoanalysis is. It can't even be said that it is wholly opposed to psychoanalysis. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari only offer to re-engineer psychoanalysis, not repudiate it or replace it. The problem isn't so much that the question isn't answered by Deleuze and Guattari or that it is somehow unanswerable; rather, the problem is that it has several answers. Unwilling to provide any kind of "formula" or "model" that would enable us to simply "do" schizoanalysis as a tick-box exercise in which everything relates inexorably to one single factor (e.g., the family), which is what they thought psychoanalysis had become, Deleuze and Guattari observe a quite deliberate strategy of providing multiple answers to the questions their work raises. Deleuze and Guattari's elaborate system of new terms and concepts is of a piece with this strategy of providing multiple answers to basic questions and should be seen as deliberately guarding against the reductive tendencies of the "practically-minded." This isn't to say schizoanalysis is either incoherent or impractical, as many of its detractors are quick to claim, but to insist that its practice cannot be divorced from its theory and that to engage with one, it is necessary to engage with the other.

In Dialogues, the conversational piece Gilles Deleuze produced in collaboration with Claire Parnet while he was working on A Thousand Plateaus with Félix Guattari, Deleuze claims that he and Guattari only ever had two things against psychoanalysis: (1) that it breaks up the productions of desire and (2) that it crushes the formations of utterances. In Deleuze's view psychoanalysis does not [End Page 9] allow the patients to speak for themselves—it only listens for slips, he argues, if it listens, and all too often, it doesn't listen at all. Slips are the only productions of the unconscious that psychoanalysis recognizes, according to Deleuze, and this leaves it incapable of apprehending, much less understanding, genuine productions when they do in fact arise. This is evident in the way it mangles the rich and vibrant articulations of desire it does encounter, reducing them all to a handful of tropes that show no appreciation for the specificity of desire's actual way of operating. In Deleuze's view, the most egregious examples of these two tendencies are to be found in psychoanalysis' handling of children. As I will discuss in more detail below, Freud seemed neither to listen to nor "hear" what his younger analysands said. In Little Hans's case, he simply put words in the boy's mouth (the boy's father was no less guilty of this, as we'll see). Deleuze and Guattari also single out Melanie Klein for being similarly deaf to her patients.

In a wonderful counter-study, Deleuze and Guattari (with the assistance of Claire Parnet and André Scala) demonstrate quite precisely just how poor psychoanalysis can be when it comes to listening to children. They list Little Hans's statements side by side with what Freud says he "hears," thus making it abundantly clear just how at odds the analyst and analysand really are in a clinical regime governed by the dictates of Oedipus.1 They repeat the same procedure for Melanie Klein's patient Little Richard. In both cases it soon becomes clear that insofar as Oedipus is taken as the starting point for all analyses, the patient is doomed never to be able to speak for himself. Horses can't just be horses for Little Hans, and trains can't just be trains for Little Richard; they must both represent the phallus, and if the boys say otherwise, they are simply overruled. That said, we shouldn't let it blind us to the fact that Deleuze and Guattari's own analysis of Little Hans offers very little by way of a concrete alternative to Freud. My point here is that Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis is not the key issue in thinking about what schizoanalysis means; it is really only a starting point. Rather, what we should be focusing...

pdf

Share