schizoanalysis

  ---- by Eugene Holland

  Schizoanalysis is the revolutionary 'materialist psychiatry' derived primarily from the critique of psychoanalysis. As the concept 'schizoanalysis' indicates, Sigmund Freud's theory of the Oedipus complex is the principle object of critique: schizoanalysis, drawing substantially on Karl Marx, transforms psychoanalysis so as to include the full scope of social and historical factors in its explanations of cognition and behaviour. Yet psychoanalysis is not rejected wholesale: schizoanalysis also draws substantially on Freud and especially on Jacques Lacan to transform historical materialism so as to include the full scope of libidinal and semiotic factors in its explanations of social structure and development. Ultimately, though perhaps least obviously, both structuralist psychoanalysis and historical materialism are transformed by Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of nihilism and asceticism and his transvaluation of difference, which inform both the libidinal and the social economies mapped by schizoanalysis. Ultimately, universal history for schizoanalysis offers the hope and the chance that the development of productive forces beyond capitalism and the expansion of Will to Power beyond nihilism will lead to greater freedom rather than enduring servitude.

  The basic question posed by schizoanalysis (following Baruch Spinoza and Wilhelm Reich) is: Why do people fight for their own servitude as stubbornly as if it were their salvation? The answer is that people have been trained since birth in asceticism by the Oedipus complex, which relays social oppression into the heart of the nuclear family. Social oppression and psychic repression, thus, are for schizoanalysis two sides of the same coin, except that schizoanalysis reverses the direction of causality, making psychic repression depend on social oppression. It is not the child who is father to the man, as the psychoanalytic saying goes, rather it is the boss who is father to the man, who is in turn father to the child: the nuclear family imprints capitalist social relations on the infant psyche. Just as capital denies (through primitive accumulation) direct access to the means of production and the means of life, and mediates between the worker, work, consumer goods and eventual retirement, so the father denies (through the threat of castration enforcing the incest taboo) direct access to the mother (the means of life), and mediates between the child, other family members and eventual marriage with a mother-substitute. By denying the child all the people closest to her, the nuclear family programmes people from birth for asceticism and self-denial.

  The critique of Oedipus is mounted on two fronts. Internally, schizoanalysis models the psyche on schizophrenia rather than neurosis, thereby revealing the immanent operations of the unconscious at work beneath the level of representation. The Oedipus complex is shown to be a systematic betrayal of unconscious processes, an illegitimate metaphysics of the psyche. But it is a metaphysics that derives directly from the reality of capitalist society. For in the external critique of the Oedipus, through a comparison of the capitalist mode of production with two other libidinal modes of production, schizoanalysis shows capitalism to be the only social formation organised by quantitative rather than qualitative relations. Capitalism organises the social by the cash nexus of the market rather than by codes and representation. Furthermore, this is the only social formation where social reproduction is isolated from social production at large, through the privatisation of reproduction in the nuclear family: the nuclear family, but also Oedipal psychoanalysis itself, are thus revealed to be strictly capitalist institutions. Yet at the same time that the nuclear family is capturing and programming desire in the Oedipus complex, the market is subverting codes and freeing desire from capture in representation throughout society at large, thereby producing schizophrenia as the radically free form of semiosis and the potential hope of universal history.

  Connectives

   § desire

   § Freud, Sigmund

   § Marx, Karl

   § oedipalisation