In the preceding section, Deleuze and Guattari examined the myth of Oedipus and its function within psychoanalysis. Here, they turn to three decisive texts by Freud — Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Schreber), A Child Is Being Beaten, and Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Their aim is not to dismiss all of Freud, but to highlight the important insights produced by psychoanalysis and the points at which Freud (and Jung) fundamentally go astray — particularly in their reduction of desire to familial and mythological structures.

Note 1: I will constantly be revising this blog post in order to do a line-by-line interpretation of the text.

• Citation Note: The citation for this text is at the bottom of the blog post.

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Deleuze and Guattari write:

It is easy to see that the problem is first of all practical, that it concerns above all else the practice of the cure. (AO, 56)

Up until this point, it is evident that the concern — both for psychoanalysis and Deleuze and Guattari’s project — is that of crafting a kind of cure. They say:

For the frenzied oedipalization process takes form precisely at the moment when Oedipus has not yet received its full theoretical formulation as the “nuclear complex” and leads a marginal existence. (AO, 56)

Oedipalization refers to the process by which desire becomes trapped within the familial structure and thereby represses itself. Importantly, this process does not depend on being formally theorized in order to occur. As we saw in our examination of Sigmund Freud’s early texts, there is no moment where psychoanalysis definitively goes astray. Thus, the roots of psychoanalysis carry with them a repressive interpretive practice as oedipalization takes form prior to the codification of Oedipus. As noted in the previous section, Oedipus occupied only a “marginal existence” throughout much of Freud’s work. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The fact that Schreber’s analysis was not in vivo detracts nothing from its exemplary value from the point of view of practice. (AO, 56)

They turn to the case of Daniel Paul Schreber. Although Schreber was never a direct patient of psychoanalysis — his case was analyzed retrospectively rather than in vivo (in-person or in a clinical setting) — his text Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) became a foundational case study for psychoanalytic interpretation. Schreber’s memoirs detail his descent into what was clinically diagnosed as “dementia praecox,” an early psychiatric category later associated with what would be called ‘schizophrenia.’

Deleuze and Guattari explain:

In this text (1911) Freud encounters the most formidable of questions: how does one dare reduce to the paternal theme a delirium so rich, so differentiated, so “divine” as the Judge’s — since the Judge in his memoirs makes only very brief references to the memory of his father. (AO, 56–57)

Freud’s text The Case of Schreber explores the interpretive methods applied to Schreber’s delirium. Yet, within Schreber’s Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, there are only brief references to his parents — his father is rarely mentioned. Deleuze and Guattari critique the reductiveness of Freud’s interpretation, which centers Schreber’s delirium in terms of repressed homosexual desire and paternal conflict. Given the extraordinary complexity of Schreber’s delirium, such a reading appears forced and unwarranted. When Deleuze and Guattari describe Schreber’s delirium as “divine,” they are referring to how Schreber believed he was communicating directly with God.

On several occasions Freud’s text marks the extent to which he felt the difficulty: to begin with, it appears difficult to assign as cause of the malady — even if only an occasional cause — an “outburst of homosexual libido” directed at Dr. Flechsig’s person. (AO, 57)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence cites Sigmund Freud, Three Case Studies (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1970). Curiously, this text is more commonly known as Three Case Histories, which includes the cases of the Wolf Man, the Rat Man, and Schreber.

Freud himself found it difficult to completely reduce Schreber’s case to homosexual desire. Specifically, he believed Schreber had projected this desire onto his physician, Dr. Flechsig. However, this did not stop Freud:

But when we replace the doctor with the father and commission the father to explain the God of delirium, we ourselves have trouble following this ascension; we take liberties that can be justified only by the advantages they afford us in our attempt to understand the delirium. (AO, 57)

• An endnote is at the end of this sentence which continues to cite Sigmund Freud, Three Case Studies (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1970).

Deleuze and Guattari problematize Freud’s interpretive framework, particularly his attempt to explain Schreber’s madness as the result of repressed homosexual desire and unresolved parental issues — which then becomes projected onto Dr. Flechsig. Freud then replaces the doctor with the father, elevating the father as the source behind Schreber’s hallucinations of God. This ascension — from doctor to father to God — is difficult to justify. Deleuze and Guattari argue that Freud imposes his own theoretical structure onto Schreber’s delirium and then rationalizes this imposition by claiming it makes the case more intelligible.

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

Yet the more Freud states such scruples, the more he thrusts them aside and sweeps them away with a firm and confident response. (AO, 57)

Freud recognizes and acknowledges the difficulties in applying certain interpretations to Schreber’s case, yet he immediately “thrusts them aside,” reaffirming the validity of his own theoretical framework with confidence. They write:

And this response is double: it is not my fault if psychoanalysis attests to a great monotony and encounters the father everywhere — in Flechsig, in the God, in the sun; it is the fault of sexuality and its stubborn symbolism. (AO, 57)

• An endnote is at the end of this sentence which continues to cite Sigmund Freud, Three Case Studies (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1970).

Freud’s response to his own difficulties in accepting his own interpretations is twofold:

First, Freud would deflect responsibility by appealing to empirical regularity (1. “it’s not my fault” and 2. “it’s your fault”). For Freud, the recurrence of the father cannot be his own doing because that is what the practice of psychoanalysis uncovers: the father appears everywhere because that is how sexuality is structured.

Second, … :

Furthermore, it is not surprising that the father returns constantly in current deliriums in the most hidden and least recognizable guises, since he returns in fact everywhere and more visibly in religions and ancient myths, which express forces or mechanisms eternally active in the unconscious. (AO, 57)

• An endnote is at the end of this sentence which continues to cite Sigmund Freud, Three Case Studies (New York: Collier, Macmillan, 1970).

This ‘second’ response Freud gives appeals to myth: since the figure of the father appears throughout religion and mythology, he justifies forcing the Schreber case into the paternal framework by claiming that the father is a timeless, ever-present figure in human storytelling.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

It should be noted that Judge Schreber’s destiny was not merely that of being sodomized, while still alive, by the rays from heaven, but also that of being posthumously oedipalized by Freud. (AO, 57)

Deleuze and Guattari provocatively remark that Schreber suffered first from his own delirium — most notably, his delusion that he was being sexually penetrated by the rays of God. But he suffered a second time, posthumously, when Freud forcibly reduced Schreber’s delirium into the framework of the paternal metaphor. They write:

From the enormous political, social, and historical content of Schreber’s delirium, not one word is retained, as though the libido did not bother itself with such things. (AO, 57)

Again, Freud fails to account for the “political, social, and historical content of Schreber’s delirium,” noting that he bypasses the entirety of these factors. The reality is that this is what produces the very delirium Schreber experiences. They write:

Freud invokes only a sexual argument, which consists in bringing about the union of sexuality and the familial complex, and a mythological argument, which consists in positing the adequation of the productive force of the unconscious and the “edifying forces of myths and religions.” (AO, 57)

• The quote “edifying forces of myths and religions” is taken from the post-script to the case of Schreber. In the French translation that Deleuze and Guattari read, Freud did not say “myths” so they added that term.

To conclude the first paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari summarize their critique: Freud is only concerned with sexuality. By linking sexuality to the family and invoking myth, Freud argues that Schreber’s delirium stems from a complex relationship with his father.

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Deleuze and Guattari begin the second paragraph by stating:

This latter argument is very important, and it is not by chance that here Freud declares himself in agreement with Jung. (AO, 57)

In the opening paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari identify two “responses” Freud offers to the problem of Schreber’s delirium. The first is a sexual argument, and the second is a mythological one. They single out the mythological argument as “very important,” since it highlights Freud’s point of convergence with Jung. In fact:

In a certain way this agreement subsists after their break. (AO, 57)

Although Freud and Jung eventually parted ways and developed distinct theories, the mythological argument continues to shape both of their work. For Freud, this takes the form of a persistent reliance on the mother–father framework, anchored in the myth of Oedipus Rex. For Jung, it appears in the turn to archetypal figures — still drawn from myth, but extending beyond the narrow confines of the immediate parental relation. Deleuze and Guattari explain:

If the unconscious is thought to express itself adequately in myths and religions (taking into account, of course, the work of transformation), there are two ways of reading this adequation, but they have in common the postulate that measures the unconscious against myth, and that from the start substitutes mere expressive forms for the productive formations. (AO, 57)

If we assume that the unconscious expresses itself “adequately in myths and religions,” then myths become the privileged site for interpreting the unconscious. Freud and Jung both acknowledge that myths undergo transformations over time, yet they treat transformations as secondary to the supposed fact that myths are the expression of the unconscious. There are, however, two distinct ways of “reading this adequation.” Although Freud and Jung’s readings move in opposite directions, they both presuppose the same foundation: that myth provides the essential model as the ultimate expression of the unconscious. Before outlining these two approaches to “reading the adequation,” Deleuze and Guattari state:

The basic question is never asked, but cast aside: Why return to myth? Why take it as the model? (AO, 57)

Freud and Jung never provide a compelling reason why myth should serve as the essential starting point for interpreting the unconscious. Out of the many possible models they could have drawn upon, they default to myths and religions, justifying this choice on the grounds that myths are narrated, performed, and dramatized; thus, they supposedly appear to lend themselves as ready-made expressions of unconscious life. From this assumption, Deleuze and Guattari identify two possible readings of myth:

The supposed adequation can then be interpreted in what is termed anagogical fashion, toward the “higher.”

Or inversely, in analytical fashion, toward the “lower,” relating the myth to the drives. (AO, 57)

In the first reading — what Deleuze and Guattari call an “anagogical fashion” — we find the Jungian approach. For Jung, archetypes drawn from myth are emblematic of something spiritual or transcendent. They exceed the individual psyche, pointing toward a higher order rooted in the collective unconscious, and are often framed as ideals to be realized or aspired to.

In the second reading — what they call an “analytical fashion” — we encounter the Freudian approach. For Freud, myths do not reveal transcendent truths but instead give form to the unconscious drives of the individual. Analysis of myth, for him, uncovers these underlying forces, particularly sexual ones, which are then funneled back into the framework of the Oedipal complex.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

But since the drives are transferred from myth, traced from myth with the transformations taken into account… (AO, 57)

The ellipses “…” mark the infinite regression at the core of Freud and Jung’s shared postulate. In their psychoanalytic framework, the unconscious is explained through myth, the drives are explained in terms of myth, and myth itself is explained through the unconscious. This process repeats indefinitely.

They continue:

What we mean is that, starting from the same postulate, Jung is led to restore the most diffuse and spiritualized religiosity, whereas Freud is confirmed in his most rigorous atheism. (AO, 57–58)

As noted earlier, Freud and Jung begin from the same starting point: myth as the privileged expression of the unconscious. Their divergence lies in the conclusions they draw. Jung moves toward a higher unity, interpreting the unconscious as a form of “spiritualized religiosity,” while Freud rejects such unity, reducing myth to the play of drives and thereby affirming a stance of “rigorous atheism.” Deleuze and Guattari summarize this contrast when they write:

Freud needs to deny the existence of God as much as Jung needs to affirm the essence of the divine, in order to interpret the commonly postulated adequation. (AO, 58)

Again, both approaches diverge in their conclusions while ultimately doing the same thing:

But to render religion unconscious, or the unconscious religious, still amounts to injecting something religious into the unconscious. (AO, 58)

Freud makes religion unconscious by treating it as an effect of unconscious processes and drives. This is evident in his interpretation of Schreber, where the projection of the father ascends from doctor to God. Jung, by contrast, renders the unconscious religious by framing it as inherently spiritual and oriented toward a higher unity, expressed through archetypal figures. Yet despite their differences, both approaches “inject something religious into the unconscious,” an operation justified only by the arbitrary privileging of myth and religion as the proper models for unconscious life.

Deleuze and Guattari conclude this paragraph by saying:

(And what would Freudian analysis be without the celebrated guilt feelings ascribed to the unconscious?) (AO, 58)

They place this quote in parentheses to highlight the irony in Freud’s thought: unconscious drives are always already found guilty — such as the form of forbidden sexual or homicidal desires toward one’s parents. This mirrors the religious concept of sin, where guilt is inevitable, and leaves the subject permanently marked as unworthy.

Paragraph Three

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

What came to pass in the history of psychoanalysis? (AO, 58)

They open the third paragraph with a genealogical question about the development of psychoanalysis:

Freud held to his atheism in heroic fashion. (AO, 58)

Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize Freud’s anti-religious views, and how he was a self-proclaimed atheist. This move by Freud feels “heroic” because Freud insisted in the absence of God which was culturally difficult at the time. Even when Jung drifted into spiritual interpretations, Freud stayed strong in his atheism. Deleuze and Guattari state:

But all around him, more and more, they respectfully allowed him to speak, they let the old man speak, ready to prepare behind his back the reconciliation of the churches and psychoanalysis, the moment when the Church would train its own psychoanalysts, and when it would become possible to write in the history of the movement: so even we are still pious! (AO, 58)

Even as Freud steadfastly maintained his atheism, he was permitted to remain a central figure in the movement. While the churches openly rejected Freud’s atheism, they simultaneously sought to reconcile psychoanalysis with religious frameworks. The Church even trained its own psychoanalysts, such that the history of psychoanalysis could be retrospectively rewritten as fundamentally religious. Thus, when Deleuze and Guattari remark, “so even we are still pious,” they are highlighting the irony of this retroactive gesture — as though psychoanalysis had been religious in origin all along.

Furthermore:

Let us recall Marx’s great declaration: [they] who [deny] God does only a “secondary thing,” for [they deny] God in order to posit the existence of man, to put man in God’s place (the transformation taken into account). (AO, 58)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence states: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.

This passage from the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is what Deleuze and Guattari are referring to:

Atheism, as the denial of this unreality, has no longer any meaning, for atheism is a negation of God, and postulates the existence of man through this negation; but socialism as socialism no longer stands in any need of such a mediation. (Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844)

Although my edition of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 does not contain the exact phrase “secondary thing,” the wording suggests that Deleuze and Guattari were relying on a different translation. In any case, they are invoking Marx’s critique of atheism: a mere denial of God leaves the theological framework intact, simply replacing God with another figure. To deny God is still to posit the existence of man, with man now assuming God’s place.

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

But the person who knows that the place of man is entirely elsewhere does not even allow the possibility of a question to subsist concerning “an alien being, a being placed above man and nature”: [they] no longer need[s] the mediation of myth, [they] no longer need[s] to go by way of this mediation — the negation of the existence of God — since [they have] attained those regions of an autoproduction of the unconscious where the unconscious is no less atheist than orphan — immediately atheist, immediately orphan. (AO, 58)

The alternative to Freud’s atheism is a perspective that refuses to posit man above nature or to rely on myth as mediation — whether in Jung’s spiritual register or Freud’s interpretation of drives. This ‘new-found’ subject rejects myth altogether and fully negates God. They grasp the autoproduction of the unconscious, an immanent process that centers neither God, nor man, nor any transcendent substitute. Just as the unconscious has no mother or father, it has no God(s):

And doubtless an examination of the first argument would lead us to a similar conclusion. (AO, 58)

The “first argument” Deleuze and Guattari refer to is the sexual argument introduced at the start of this section. Just as they have shown how the mediation of myth can be rejected by the subject who refuses to center either man or God, so too can we reach the same conclusion by rejecting the myth of sexuality. Freud’s sexual argument, which reduces drives to sexuality and ties them to the family complex, functions as another mediation that blocks the unconscious from its immediate productivity. Furthermore:

By joining sexuality to the familial complex, by making Oedipus into the criterion of sexuality in analysis — the test of orthodoxy par excellence — Freud himself posited the whole of social and metaphysical relations as an afterward or a beyond that desire was incapable of investing immediately. (AO, 58)

This sentence critiques how Freud, by joining sexuality to the familial complex and making Oedipus the ultimate criterion of sexuality, renders all other relations — social and metaphysical — derivative. (“Social” here refers to social production and “metaphysical” refers to desiring-production. This is evident from Chapter 1.6). These relations become an “afterward” (they can only appear after the family complex) or a “beyond” (something inaccessible to desire directly). (The “afterward” may refer to what happens after the psychoanalysis session; the “beyond” may refer to Freud’s 1920 text Beyond the Pleasure Principle).

Oedipus imposes a mediation: instead of desire immediately investing social and historical reality, it must pass through the myth of the family. Thus, social production and desiring-production are displaced into a transcendent register, treated as if imposed from outside rather than produced immanently. Deleuze and Guattari conclude this paragraph by stating:

He then became rather indifferent to the fact that this beyond derives from the familial complex through the analytical transformation of desire, or is signified by it in an anagogical symbolization. (AO, 58)

The argument forwarded by Deleuze and Guattari here is that Freud had two manners of relating everything back to Oedipus. The first was an “analytical transformation,” where social and religious phenomena were treated as derived from family dynamics. For example, Schreber’s vision of God was interpreted as a projection of his father. The second was an “anagogical symbolization,” where society and religion were read as symbolic representations of the family dynamic. For example, the myth of Oedipus or other religious narratives already exist, but Freud interprets them as symbolic confirmations of familial relations.

(Put simply, Freud was indifferent between the two approaches. On one hand, desire could be seen as invested directly in the family, so that everything else is projected outward from it. On the other hand, one could begin from myth itself, reading it as a symbolic representation of the family. Either way, the family complex remained the universal mediator.)

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Deleuze and Guattari continue by detailing one of Freud’s texts:

Let us consider another text of Freud’s, a later one, where Oedipus is already designated as the “nuclear complex”: “A Child Is Being Beaten.” (AO, 58)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence states: Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions (1919).

To grasp Deleuze and Guattari’s analysis properly, one must turn to Freud’s A Child Is Being Beaten.

Curtain Rises: A Child Is Being Beaten

In 1919, Freud published one of his more curious essays: A Child Is Being Beaten. He observed that many of his patients — especially those with hysteria or obsessional neuroses — confessed to a recurring childhood fantasy of someone being punished. Strangely, the fantasy was bound up with intense pleasure (often masturbation), even though witnessing an actual beating usually provoked disgust. Analyzing four women and two men, Freud concluded that this repetitive thought pointed to something deeper in the unconscious.

The fantasy, Freud insists, is both real and invented. It doesn’t necessarily reflect an actual event of being beaten (though some patients had such experiences). The fantasy is purely representative of unconscious (and conscious) drives.

For girls, Freud outlined three phases:

• Phase One: “My father is beating the child I hate.” Here, the fantasy expresses sibling rivalry: the father’s punishment of a rival proves his love is reserved for me.
• Phase Two: “I am being beaten by my father.” This stage is never consciously remembered. Freud reconstructs it to show how love for the father collides with guilt — turning desire into punishment. Here, masochism takes root: pain becomes fused with love.
• Phase Three: “The teacher is beating that child.” A teacher or authority figure beats boys while the girl watches. Though it appears sadistic, Freud argues that this remains masochistic — the boys are substitutes for the girl herself. In this stage, girls often adopt a “masculinity complex,” identifying with boys even as they imagine them being punished.

For boys, Freud expected a symmetrical image but found something different. The unconscious kernel is the same — “My father is beating me,” (which means “my father loves me”). But consciously, the fantasy transforms into “My mother is beating me.” For Freud, this explains adult male masochists who submit to women in punishment scenarios: the underlying dynamic is still a feminine attitude toward the father, displaced onto the mother.

(Put simply, the girl begins with rivalry and only later turns the punishment onto herself, while the boy begins with himself as the beaten child from the start.)

For Freud, all of this matters because it shows how such fantasies are residues of the Oedipus complex. He writes:

[The fantasy of a child being beaten] is brought into relation with the child’s incestuous love-object, with its Oedipus complex. It first comes into prominence in the sphere of this complex, and after the complex has broken down it remains over, often quite by itself, the inheritor of the charge of libido from that complex and weighed down by the sense of guilt that was attached to it. The abnormal sexual constitution, finally, has shown its strength by forcing the Oedipus complex into a particular direction, and by compelling [the Oedipus complex] to leave an unusual residue behind. (A Child Being Beaten; emphasis mine)

Ultimately, Freud argues that while the Oedipus complex must collapse under repression —( after all, one cannot function in society while openly declaring a wish to sleep with one’s mother and kill one’s father) — the Oedipus complex never disappears without a trace. It leaves behind a residue, a kind of psychic “scar,” that carries both desire and guilt. These residues persist in disguised forms, surfacing in seemingly strange but revealing fantasies like “a child is being beaten.”

Curtain Falls: A Child Has Been Beat

When Deleuze and Guattari turn to A Child Is Being Beaten, they note that Freud designates Oedipus as the “nuclear complex.” In Freud’s terms, this means that every neurosis — whether hysteria, obsession, or otherwise — has its very nucleus in the Oedipus complex. Oedipus becomes a universal explanatory principle: no matter the symptom, it must ultimately be traced back to the parental triangle.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

The reader cannot escape the impression of a disquieting strangeness. (AO, 58)

Reading A Child Is Being Beaten leaves one with a genuine sense of strangeness, as though Freud were forcing the patient’s fantasy into the mold of Oedipus. Deleuze and Guattari observe:

Never was the paternal theme less visible, and yet never was it affirmed with as much passion and resolution. (AO, 58)

Once again, the paternal theme is absent — and yet Oedipus is made to appear. Freud interprets every phase of the fantasy through the figure of the father. For girls, it takes the form: “the father beats that child and then beats me” — a structure that allows the father to be displaced onto other authority figures. For boys, it becomes: “the father beats me,” which later shifts into the mother taking the father’s place, with sexual pleasure now bound to a feminine attitude toward the father. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The imperialism of Oedipus is founded here on an absence. (AO, 58)

Oedipus did not emerge because patients themselves linked their fantasies to the figure of the father — it was Freud who imposed that connection. The status of oedipus as a universal explanation was secured not through the presence of Oedipus in the material, but through its absence.

Deleuze and Guattari continue by referring directly to Freud’s text:

After all, of the three supposed phases of the girl’s fantasy, the first is such that the father does not yet appear, while in the third the father no longer appears: that leaves the second, then, where the father shines forth in all his brilliance, “clearly without doubt” — but indeed, “this second phase has never had a real existence.

It is never remembered, it has never succeeded in becoming conscious.

It is a construction of analysis, but it is no less a necessity on that account.” (AO, 58–59)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence states: Sigmund Freud, A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions (1919).

Oddly enough, Freud’s own account of the girl’s fantasy does not require the father. In the first phase, another child is the one being beaten. In the third, the figure shifts to a generalized authority. Only in the second phase does the father explicitly appear — “I am being beaten by my father.” Yet even here Freud concedes that this is not a remembered or conscious desire, but a “construction of analysis.”

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Deleuze and Guattari posit a question:

What is at issue in this fantasy? (AO, 59)

They ask what the true problem is within the fantasy of ‘a child being beaten’:

Some boys are beaten by someone — the teacher, for example — in the presence of the little girls. (AO, 59)

Here, they briefly describe the fantasy once more. They continue:

We are present from the start at a double Freudian reduction, which is in no way imposed by the fantasy, but is required by Freud in the manner of a presupposition. (AO, 59)

In their analysis, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize what they term Freud’s ‘double reduction’ of the fantasy. This move is not derived from the fantasy — as the fantasy imposes no such reduction — but is instead introduced as Freud’s presupposition. This means that before the fantasy is presented, Freud has already reduced it to the paternal metaphor. Deleuze and Guattari then distinguish this reduction’s two components:

On the one hand Freud wants to deliberately reduce the group character of the fantasy to a purely individual dimension: the beaten children must in a way be the ego (“substitutes for the subject himself”) and the one who does the beating must be the father (“father substitute”). (AO, 59)

Firstly, Freud reduces the “group character” of the fantasy to an “individual dimension.” In A Child Is Being Beaten, he acknowledges that the scenario often takes place in a collective setting — for example, a teacher beating a child in front of other students. Yet Freud translates this group scene into a strictly personal structure: the beaten child is interpreted as a substitute for the ego (the patient identifies with the child being beaten), while the figure of the teacher is reduced to a father-substitute. And:

On the other hand it is necessary for the variations of the fantasy to be organized in disjunctions whose use must be strictly exclusive. (AO, 59)

Secondly, Freud deepens the reduction by making his interpretation hinge on the gender of the patient. The variations of the fantasy are organized into strictly exclusive disjunctions: a girl must relate to the fantasy in a prescribed way that a boy could never relate to, and vice versa:

Hence there will be a girl-series and a boy-series, but dissymmetrical, the female fantasy having three phases, the last of which is “boys are beaten by the teacher,” while the male fantasy has only two, the last of which is “my mother beats me.” (AO, 59)

If the inclusive disjunction is expressed as “either… or… or…,” the exclusive disjunction takes the stricter form of “either/or.” Freud’s analysis of the fantasy is organized according to this exclusive model: there is a “girl-series” and a “boy-series,” each rigidly defined. A girl can only occupy the girl-series and never the boy’s, just as a boy is confined to his own. Freud thus establishes three phases for the girl-series and two phases for the boy-series, with no possibility of overlap. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The only common phase — the second for the girls and the first for the boys — affirms without doubt the prevalence of the father in both cases, but this is the famous nonexistent phase. (AO, 59)

The only apparent overlap between the two series lies in the phase where the father assumes the central role. Yet Freud himself — as already noted — considered this phase to be non-existent, a product of analytic construction rather than an authentic element of the fantasy. As a result, the girl- and boy-series remain strictly exclusive, though both remain subordinated to the law of the father.

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Deleuze and Guattari write:

Such is always the case with Freud. (AO, 59)

Per the usual, Freud reduces the fantasy to the father. But he does so in a specific manner:

Something common to the two sexes is required, but something that will be lacking in both, and that will distribute the lack in two nonsymmetrical series, establishing the exclusive use of the disjunctions: you are girl or boy! (AO, 59)

Though Freud describes a nonsymmetrical boy-series and girl-series, both are organized around a common element: lack. Each series is marked by incompleteness — the girl already lacking, the boy is already lacking — so that, despite their differences, both are defined in negative terms. At this point, Deleuze and Guattari begin to introduce the second paralogism, the “exclusive use of the disjunctions.” Whereas the disjunctive synthesis reveals disjunctions to be inclusive (either … or … or …) Freud’s schema imposes an exclusive choice: one is either a girl or a boy (either/or). The two series differ in trajectory, but both culminate in the same structural lack. Furthermore:

Such is the case with Oedipus and its “resolution,” different in boys and in girls. (AO, 59)

The exclusive disjunctions at work in A Child is Being Beaten reappear in Oedipus. Both boys and girls are assigned their own nonsymmetrical series, yet each is funneled toward the same endpoint: subjectivation through lack. Whether one is positioned in the boy-series or the girl-series, the “resolution” of Oedipus guarantees the same outcome — the subject is constituted as lacking. And

Such is the case with castration, and its relationship to Oedipus in both instances. (AO, 59)

In psychoanalysis, castration operates as an exclusive disjunction. For the girl, castration is a structural position where she finds herself as already lacking the penis. For the boy, castration takes the form of a threat — the fear of losing what he possesses. Though the terms differ, both positions culminate in subjectivity constituted through lack, organized by the phallus as a common signifier.

Castration is at once the common lot — that is, the prevalent and transcendent Phallus, and the exclusive distribution that presents itself in girls as desire for the penis, and in boys as fear of losing it or refusal of a passive attitude. (AO, 59)

When Deleuze and Guattari speak of the “transcendent Phallus,” they mean that psychoanalysis installs the phallus as a universal operator of lack. It becomes the ground of subjectivity for the “common lot,” binding everyone under the same signifier. Yet this universality is split by an exclusive disjunction. For the girl, castration is coded as penis-envy — a perpetual search for what she is said never to have. For the boy, castration appears as the threat of loss or the fear of being feminized — never secure in what he supposedly has. In both cases, subjectivity is constituted as incomplete. The outcome is binary and exclusive: either you are a girl or you are a boy, both equally defined through lack.

This something in common must lay the foundation for the exclusive use of the disjunctions of the unconscious — and teach us resignation. (AO, 59)

Deleuze and Guattari note that the transcendent phallus provides the very foundation upon which the unconscious is forced into an exclusive structure. (It is by means of this universal signifier of lack that desire is recoded into the binary “either/or.”) Within this framework, the subject is trained to resign themselves to incompleteness.

Resignation to Oedipus, to castration: for girls, renunciation of their desire for the penis; for boys, renunciation of male protest — in short, “assumption of one’s sex.”* (AO, 59)

• A footnote at the end of this sentence states:

*Sigmund Freud, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937), in Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (New York: Macmillan; London: Hogarth Press, 1964), Vol. 23, pp. 250–52: “The two corresponding themes are in the female, an envy for the penis — a positive striving to possess a male genital — and, in the male, a struggle against his passive or feminine attitude to another male. … At no other point . . . does one suffer more from an oppressive feeling that one has been “preaching to the winds,’ than when one is trying to persuade a woman to abandon her wish for a penis on the ground of its being unrealizable or when one is seeking to convince a man that a passive attitude to men does not always signify castration and that it is indispensable in many relationships in life. The rebellious overcompensation of the male produces one of the strongest transference-resistances. He refuses to subject himself to a father-substitute, or to feel indebted to him for anything, and consequently he refuses to accept his recovery from the doctor.” (Translators’ note: Hereafter this source will be cited as Standard Edition.)

The subject does not simply move through Oedipal stages; Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the subject must actively submit to them. Castration is treated as a universal principle that demands acceptance. For the girl, this means recognizing that penis-envy can never be satisfied — she must resign herself to never attaining the phallus. For the boy, it means relinquishing his protest against the threat of castration — rebellion must give way to obedience. In both cases, subjectivation hinges on resignation. Deleuze and Guattari cite Freud’s Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937): the subject must be compelled to assume a fixed identity, to take up the “correct” side of the exclusive disjunction.

They conclude this paragraph by stating:

This something in common, the great Phallus, the Lack with two nonsuperimposable sides, is purely mythical; it is like the One in negative theology, it introduces lack into desire and causes exclusive series to emanate, to which it attributes a goal, an origin, and a path of resignation. (AO, 59–60)

The “great Phallus,” or Lack, has “two nonsuperimposable sides,” meaning that the boy-series and girl-series cannot be mapped onto one another — they are not mirror images, but asymmetrical distributions of lack. Deleuze and Guattari call this transcendent structure “mythical,” since it is not an intrinsic principle of desire but something imposed upon it. They liken it to the “One” in negative theology: just as apophatic theology defines God only by negation (God is not good because God transcends goodness, God is not XYZ…), psychoanalysis defines the phallus as an absent transcendence that organizes desire. Once introduced, this mythical operator forces desire into exclusive disjunctions, producing the nonsymmetrical binaries of “boy” and “girl.” Each series is given a trajectory with a goal: to accept lack, resign oneself to castration, and submit to Oedipus.

Paragraph Seven

Deleuze and Guattari state:

The contrary should be said: neither is there anything in common between the two sexes, nor do they cease communicating with each other in a transverse mode where each subject possesses both of them, but with the two of them partitioned off, and where each subject communicates with one sex or the other in another subject. (AO, 60)

Building from the previous paragraph, Deleuze and Guattari argue the contrary: there is no “common lot” in which both sexes share an inherent lack, no shared negative One akin to apophatic theology. Instead of being fixed in a strict binary, the sexes communicate transversally; the series are not sealed off from one another but intersect and cross. A subject is never simply a “boy” or a “girl.” Each subject carries both sexes, though not as a unified synthesis into some new boy–girl series. Rather, the sexes are partitioned and distributed within the subject, opening lines of communication with one sex or the other in another subject.

This concept can seem confusing when set against the way social conditioning typically ties sex and gender together. The normative view is largely anatomical: if you do not have a penis, you are placed in the girl-series; if you have one, you are placed in the boy-series. From this assignment, a trajectory is mapped out in advance. But for Deleuze and Guattari, this view of subjectivity is imposed. It is the product of Oedipal coding, which forces the desire into binary paths. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari argue that desire is not innately confined to these rigid pathways: desire criss-crosses across these series.

They write:

Such is the law of partial objects. (AO, 60)

Per the three syntheses, desire operates inclusively (specifically found in the second synthesis). Partial objects are not bound to a single molar path; they connect with other partial objects in multiple, transversal ways. It is this “law of partial objects” that structures the unconscious. Oedipus, by contrast, is an imposition: it divides subjects into exclusive series defined by lack, reducing the multiplicity of connections to binary destinies. Furthermore:

Nothing is lacking, nothing can be defined as a lack; nor are the disjunctions in the unconscious ever exclusive, but rather the object of a properly inclusive use that we must analyze. (AO, 60)

Desire is not lack, nor can it be defined as lack. There is no “either/or” that confines desire to an exclusive disjunction. What Freud treats as exclusive, Deleuze and Guattari argue is in fact the object of an inclusive disjunction — one that must be analyzed. They write:

Freud had a concept at his disposal for stating this contrary notion: the concept of bisexuality; and it was not by chance that he was never able or never wanted to give this concept the analytical position and extension it required. (AO, 60)

Freud could have rejected the exclusive route and gone for an inclusive one. In fact, Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) highlighted how Freud believed humans were constitutionally bisexual — not in a manner of sexual attraction to two genders, but the idea that each individual carries with them “masculine” and “feminine” dispositions. The fundamental issue with Freud is that he could not dive further into this concept without the Oedipal binary (mother/father, man/woman) being undermined.

Furthermore:

Without even going that far, a lively controversy developed when certain analysts, following Melanie Klein, tried to define the unconscious forces of the female sexual organ by positive characteristics in terms of partial objects and flows. (AO, 60)

Before psychoanalysis could even engage fully with the idea of a bisexuated subject, a controversy had already emerged within the field. Following Melanie Klein, a post-Freudian analyst whom Deleuze and Guattari credit with “discovering” partial objects, analysts began to rethink the female sexual organ. Klein’s reinterpretation treated the vagina not as that which merely lacks a penis, but as an organ with its own functions, flows, and forces. Freud pushed back:

This slight shift — which did not suppress mythical castration but made it depend secondarily on the organ, instead of the organ’s depending on it — met with great opposition from Freud. (AO, 60)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence states: “On the importance of this controversy, see Andre Green, ‘Sur la mere phallique,’ Revue francaise de psychanalyse, January 1968, pp. 8–9.”

Deleuze and Guattari cite André Green, a French psychoanalysis that engaged the tensions with Freudian and post-Freudian developments. Regardless, Deleuze and Guattari note that Klein’s reinterpretations did not eliminate Freud’s castration complex. For Freud, the organ (penis/vagina) is defined by castration. For Klein, castration follows an organ’s function. However, Freud fought back because Klein’s interpretation did not view castration as primary. Deleuze and Guattari write:

[Freud] maintained that the organ, from the viewpoint of the unconscious, could not be understood except by proceeding from a lack or a primal deprivation, and not the opposite. (AO, 60)

Freud held firm in his positioning of lack as primary. Under his framework, the organ can only be understood as “proceeding from a lack.”

Paragraph Eight

Deleuze and Guattari write:

Here we have a properly analytical fallacy (which will be found again, to a considerable degree, in the theory of the signifier) that consists in passing from the detachable partial object to the position of a complete object as the thing detached (phallus). (AO, 60)

There is a fundamentally structural failure of psychoanalysis: an analytical fallacy (‘phallacy’ might be better). This is seen in how Freud conceptualizes the transcendent phallus as that which distributes lack to the nonsymmetrical series. (Deleuze and Guattari also notice this analytical fallacy in the theory of signifier which they will explain in-depth later). The fallacy is how Freud takes a detachable partial object, such as the penis, and then situates this detached partial object as a complete object or global person.

This passage implies a subject, defined as a fixed ego of one sex or the other, who necessarily experiences as a lack his subordination to the tyrannical complete object. (AO, 60)

Once the phallus is elevated to a transcendent status, it compels the formation of a fixed subject — a “fixed ego” — that orbits around it. In Freud’s framework, this means being positioned within either the girl-series or the boy-series. In both cases, the subject is defined negatively, its identity determined through subordination to the phallus. Furthermore:

This is perhaps no longer the case when the partial object is posited for itself on the body without organs, with — as its sole subject — not an “ego,” but the drive that forms the desiring-machine along with it, and that enters into relationships of connection, disjunction, and conjunction with other partial objects, at the core of the corresponding multiplicity whose every element can only be defined positively. (AO, 60)

Deleuze and Guattari offer a different perspective: the partial object does not ascend to the position of a global, transcendent person. Instead, the partial object remains on the surface of the body without organs. There is no fixed ego that identifies with it; rather, it is paired with a drive, and together they form a desiring-machine. (Here Deleuze and Guattari reinterpret Freud’s notion of “drives” not as instinctual impulses but as machinic operations.) Partial objects are the components, while desiring-machines are the functional assemblages that arise when partial objects and ‘drives’ are coupled. These machines enter into relations of connection, disjunction, and conjunction in a binary-linear fashion, producing a multiplicity that is defined positively — not by lack.

They continue:

We must speak of “castration” in the same way we speak of oedipalization, whose crowning moment it is: castration designates the operation by which psychoanalysis castrates the unconscious, injects castration into the unconscious. (AO, 60)

Deleuze and Guattari argue that castration must be understood in the same manner as oedipalization, of which it is the “crowning moment.” Castration is not a priori to the unconscious; it is injected into the unconscious, forcing all flows of desire to be subordinated to the phallus (lack). And:

Castration as a practical operation on the unconscious is achieved when the thousand breaks-flows of desiring-machines — all positive, all productive — are projected into the same mythical space, the unary stroke of the signifier. (AO, 60-61)

Deleuze and Guattari describe castration as a “practical operation”: the positive, productive breaks of desiring-machines are deemed negative by being projected into a single mythical space. In each of the syntheses, breaks occur — cuts in the flow of connection, detachments in disjunction, residues in conjunction — but these are not deficiencies; they are positive and productive. Psychoanalysis, however, treats them as lack. All breaks are interpreted through the same drama, as if on stage, with Oedipus as the central scene. This is what Deleuze and Guattari mean by the “unary stroke of the signifier”: the Name-of-the-Father, as primordial signifier, is made to preside over the unconscious, distributing lack across every flow.

Paragraph Nine

To continue:

We have not finished chanting the litany of the ignorances of the unconscious; it knows nothing of castration or Oedipus, just as it knows nothing of parents, gods, the law, lack. (AO, 61)

Deleuze and Guattari employ religious language (“chanting”) to mock the ritualistic status psychoanalysis grants to Oedipus and castration. Their claim is not that the unconscious is ignorant in the sense of failure, but that it operates through a non-recognition of these categories. As argued earlier, the unconscious knows nothing of parents or gods, since these figures already global persons. They write:

The Women’s Liberation movements are correct in saying: We are not castrated, so you get fucked. (AO, 61)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence states: “See for example the (moderate) protest of Betty Friedan against the Freudian and psychoanalytic conception of “feminine problems,” sexual as well as social: The Feminine Mystique (New York: Norton, 1963).”
• The French text reads: “Les mouvements de libération des femmes ont raison de dire : nous ne sommes pas castrées, on vous emmerde.” However, “on vous emmerde” is untranslatable.

The Women’s Liberation movements that Deleuze and Guattari refer to emerges as a resistance to hegemonic masculinity and, more specifically, to psychoanalytic accounts that define women through lack. This critique is articulated in Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, which rejects Freudian claims that women are constituted by penis envy. When Deleuze and Guattari write “so you get fucked,” they provocatively highlight the theoretical reversal produced by this refusal: if women are not defined by castration, then the Oedipal framework collapses. The sexual explicitness of the phrase is purposeful, signaling not a simple inversion in which women dominate men, but a disruption of the sexual economy that marginalized women.

Furthermore:

And far from being able to get by with anything like the wretched maneuver where men answer that this itself is proof that women are castrated — or even console women by saying that men are castrated, too, all the while rejoicing that they are castrated the other way, on the side that is not superimposable — it should be recognized that Women’s Liberation movements contain, in a more or less ambiguous state, what belongs to all requirements of liberation: the force of the unconscious itself, the investment by desire of the social field, the disinvestment of repressive structures. (AO, 61)

Deleuze and Guattari describe two common ways men respond when women reject the notion of castration. The first, which they call a “wretched maneuver,” consists in claiming that this rejection itself proves castration (i.e., resistance deemed merely an expression of lack). The second response presents itself as more egalitarian: men assert that they are also castrated, treating castration as a shared condition. Yet this apparent symmetry is misleading, since men continue to occupy the non-superimposable position that preserves symbolic authority and power. Against both responses, Deleuze and Guattari argue that Women’s Liberation movements contain “all the requirements of liberation” by withdrawing desire from repressive structures and dismantling a structuralist conception of the unconscious.

They write:

Nor are we going to say that the question is not that of knowing if women are castrated, but only if the unconscious “believes it,” since all the ambiguity lies there. (AO, 61)

Deleuze and Guattari reject the claim that women are castrated along with the attempts to preserve castration by relocating it in the unconscious as belief. The line of argumentation goes: “Well, women might not be castrated, but the unconscious believes they are… and belief structures desire.” This maneuver allows psychoanalysis to retreat from biological determinism while still maintaining castration as a structural principle. For Deleuze and Guattari, this move fails because the unconscious is productive rather than representational; it does not operate through belief.

They proceed to ask questions:

What does belief applied to the unconscious signify?

What is an unconscious that no longer does anything but “believe,” rather than produce?

What are the operations, the artifices that inject the unconscious with “beliefs” that are not even irrational, but on the contrary only too reasonable and consistent with the established order? (AO, 61)

These three questions serve to clarify Deleuze and Guattari’s project. The first implicitly critiques the attribution of belief to the unconscious, since belief presupposes a fixed subject capable of believing. The second intensifies this critique by asking what remains of the unconscious if it is reduced to belief — suggesting that the unconscious would function as an echo chamber for socially imposed norms. The third question shifts the focus to power and institutions, asking how such beliefs are installed, by whom, and why they consistently align with the established social order. These questions accuse psychoanalysis of mistaking belief and ideology for the unconscious itself.

Paragraph Ten

Deleuze and Guattari proceed:

Let us return to the fantasy, “a child is being beaten, children are beaten” — a typical group fantasy where desire invests the social field and its repressive forms. (AO, 61)

They make clear that they are returning to Freud’s analysis of the beating fantasy, but they immediately reframe it as a paradigmatic example of a group fantasy. Desire invests the social field and can be ultimately repressive in the process. Rather than an individual scene, the fantasy involves institutions, norms, authority figures, and methods of punishment, marking it as irreducibly social. They write:

If there is a mise en scene, it is directed by a social desiring-machine whose product should not be considered abstractly, separating the girl’s and the boy’s cases, as if each were a little ego taking up its own business with daddy and mommy. (AO, 61)

Deleuze and Guattari concede an important point: there is indeed a staging at work, in the sense that the fantasy presents itself as a scene with seemingly assigned roles. Where they depart from psychoanalysis is in identifying who directs this scene. Freud assumes that the family (and more specifically the father) functions as the director, with Oedipus providing the script. By contrast, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the scene is directed by a social desiring-machine. This production should not be treated abstractly, as Freud does when he isolates the fantasy from its broader social context. His separation of girls’ and boys’ cases, along with the asymmetrical Oedipal reductions, presupposes fixed egos for whom sexual identity is primary. Against this view, it is integral to remember that desire is collective and social before it is individual.

They write:

On the contrary, we should consider the complementary ensemble made up of boy-girl and parents-agents of production and antiproduction, this ensemble being present at the same time in each individual and in the socius that presides over the organization of the group fantasy. (AO, 61)

Deleuze and Guattari mark a direct opposition to Freud’s methodology. Rather than separating boys and girls into distinct developmental tracks that converge on Oedipus, they recombine these elements into a single ensemble. This ensemble is a functional arrangement rather than a binary or hierarchical structure. The term “complementary” is doing heavy lifting: it indicates that there is neither an opposition between boy and girl nor a hierarchy in which parents are above children. Instead, the boy–girl and parents-agents operate through distinct and interconnected forces of production and antiproduction. As established in Chapter One, desiring-machines generate both production and antiproduction immanently. In this case, the group fantasy emerges from a co-constitutive relation among boy–girl and parents-agents, revealing fantasy as a social production rather than an individualized Oedipal drama.

Continuing this line of thought:

Simultaneously the boys are beaten-initiated by the teacher on the little girl’s erotic stage (seeing-machine), and obtain satisfaction in a masochistic fantasy involving the mother (anal machine). (AO, 61)

There is no fixed subject or individual ego that possesses the fantasy; rather, the fantasy is distributed across a set of desiring-machines. The boys are beaten by the teacher, who functions as an agent of social production and discipline. The girl hosts the erotic visual stage, with eye-machines that invest the scene. The boys’ satisfaction is routed through the anal-machine. This last machine should be understood less in terms of physiology than as a circuit of bodily regulation through which desire can derive satisfaction from discipline and repetition rather than from Oedipal guilt. (They are rereading Freud’s anal stage of psychosexual development.)

Deleuze and Guattari write:

The result is that the boys are able to see only by becoming little girls, and the girls cannot experience the pleasure of punishment except by becoming boys. (AO, 61)

This is the core of their critique: there is no individual ego that unfolds the fantasy of a child being beaten. The fantasy is not individual but collective — a group fantasy. The crossing of gendered positions exposes the failure of Freud’s asymmetrical Oedipal model. The boy’s experience of being beaten by the teacher is masochistic, but this pleasure is only produced through identification with the girl’s position — specifically, the position of being seen, of functioning as an erotic spectacle. Conversely, the girl’s experience of pleasure in punishment occurs only by occupying the boy’s position, that of discipline and initiation through violence. Thus, the boy becomes girl and the girl becomes boy in this scene.

They explain:

It is a whole chorus, a montage: back in the village after a raid in Vietnam, in the presence of their weeping sisters, the filthy Marines are beaten by their instructor, on whose knees the mommy is seated, and they have orgasms for having been so evil, for having tortured so well.

It’s so bad, but also so good! (AO, 61)

This passage explicitly invokes the Vietnam War. Deleuze and Guattari’s language is not neutral — “filthy Marines” — reflecting a broader understanding of the war as a paradigmatic instance of imperial violence. Vietnam functions as both a counterexample and expansion of Freud’s analysis. Rather than isolated individual egos, the scene presents what Deleuze and Guattari call a “whole chorus” (a group fantasy). The raided village, the “weeping sisters,” and the Marines beaten by their instructor form a montage that structurally parallels Freud’s classroom scene of boys beaten before girls.

Interestingly, Deleuze and Guattari’s depiction of the mother seated on the instructor’s knees illustrates how discipline and violence are framed as acts performed “for your own good.” Violence is presented as necessary and corrective — in the form of U.S. soldiers destroying villages as a means of salvation.

The example of Vietnam is purposeful: soldiers confronted guilt, confusion, and patriotic enjoyment simultaneously. As a televised and publicly contested war, Vietnam foregrounded the role of a kind of (erotic) spectacle. When Deleuze and Guattari write that the Marines have orgasms “for having tortured so well,” they are explaining how repression and violence are not external to pleasure but function as a productive condition of libidinal investment within the social field.

• The orgasm here may be understood in a Bataillean sense as a limit-experience that destabilizes the organized body, producing pleasure through disruption.

Paragraph Eleven

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

Perhaps one will recall a sequence from the film Hearts and Minds: we see Colonel Patton, the general’s son, saying that his guys are great, that they love their mothers, their fathers, and their country, that they cry at the religious services for their dead buddies, fine boys; then the colonel’s face changes, grimaces, and reveals a big paranoiac in uniform who shouts in conclusion: but still, they’re a bloody good bunch of killers! (AO, 62)

• Unfortunately, the English translation is inaccurate. In the French text, Deleuze and Guattari write, “On se souvient peut-être d’une séquence du film Dix-septième parallèle…” This passage does not refer to Hearts and Minds (released in 1974, two years after the publication of Anti-Oedipus), but rather to The 17th Parallel: Vietnam in War, the 1968 documentary by Joris Ivens.

Regardless of the incorrect reference in the English translation, Deleuze and Guattari use this example to show that the very same social machines that produce the soldier who loves his comrades, his mother and father, his country, and who mourns his fallen friends are also the machines that produce him as a killer. The colonel — “a big paranoiac in uniform” — makes this continuity explicit when he concludes that they are a “bloody good bunch of killers.” What this scene reveals is that the social field at work is composed of intersecting forces: state sovereignty, military discipline, religion, mourning rituals, and organized violence, all invested by desire.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

It is obvious that when traditional psychoanalysis explains that the instructor is the father, and that the colonel too is the father, and that the mother is nonetheless the father too, it reduces all of desire to a familial determination that no longer has anything to do with the social field actually invested by the libido. (AO, 62)

Psychoanalysis responds by collapsing the entire scene into the figure of the father: the instructor, colonel, and mother are all representations of the father. Desire becomes reduced to a “familial determination.” In doing so, psychoanalysis misunderstands and botches the social field, treating military discipline, state sovereignty, religion, and collective violence as mere secondary effects of an intrafamilial drama.

To continue:

Of course there is always something from the father or the mother that is taken up in the signifying chain — daddy’s mustache, the mother’s raised arm — but it comes furtively to occupy a place among the collective agents. (AO, 62)

Deleuze and Guattari concede a limited point to psychoanalysis: parental figures and images may indeed appear in the signifying chain, but only fleetingly. The examples they give — daddy’s mustache or the mother’s raised arm — are not global persons. They are partial objects: detachable signs that circulate within the chain. These fragments do not organize the fantasy. Instead, they slip in “furtively,” taking their place alongside other social machines. Thus, even if a colonel’s mustache recalls one’s father, the mustache remains only a partial object and not the father himself; it does not follow that the father is directing the scene.

Furthermore:

The terms of Oedipus do not form a triangle, but exist shattered into all corners of the social field — the mother on the instructor’s knees, the father next to the colonel. (AO, 62)

Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the terms of Oedipus do not readily form a simple familial triangle, but are already dispersed throughout the social field. When soldiers are disciplined and told that it is “for their own good,” care operates from within authority itself. This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to when they speak of the mother appearing on the instructor’s knees: the maternal function of care is embedded within disciplinary power. The same logic applies to the father appearing next to the colonel, where the paternal function takes the form of command. Thus, Oedipus is not a ready-made triangle that later spreads across society. Rather, its terms — mother and father — are already distributed across the social field as functions; these functions are not global persons. The question, then, becomes: by what process are these distributed functions reconstituted as global persons?

They write:

Group fantasy is plugged into and machined on the socius. (AO, 62)

Put simply, group fantasies are never individual because they are always “machined on the socius.” They are not ready-made psychic contents but are produced through social production, organized by social machines. Deleuze and Guattari end this paragraph by stating:

Being fucked by the socius, wanting to be fucked by the socius, does not derive from the father and mother, even though the father and mother have their roles there as subordinate agents of transmission or execution. (AO, 62)

Parental figures are not a priori starting points for subjects either “being fucked by the socius” (that is, being disciplined and punished) or “wanting to be fucked by the socius” (those who cry out “more taxes, less bread!”). For Deleuze and Guattari, these positions are produced by and through the social field, not grounded in the family as an originary scene. That said, they do not deny the importance of the father and mother as “agents of transmission”: figures through whom socially produced norms are relayed and reproduced within the familial setting.

Paragraph Twelve

Deleuze and Guattari write:

When the notion of group fantasy was elaborated in the perspective of institutional analysis — in the works of the team at La Borde Clinic, assembled around Jean Oury — the first task was to show how it differed from individual fantasy. (AO, 62)

In 1953, the psychiatrist Jean Oury purchased the château (castle) that would later become the La Borde Clinic (located about an hour from Paris). Oury’s goal was not to establish another conventional psychiatric institution, but to create a site for a different form of analysis. Rather than the clinical, carceral spaces typical of hospitals and prisons, the château was deliberately chosen for its architecture: a space that encouraged movement, wandering, and exploration rather than solitary confinement to a single room.

Oury invited Guattari to serve as co-director, and together they transformed La Borde into an experimental communal dwelling. There was no fixed hierarchy separating doctors from patients; individuals chose their own clothing; systems were created to rotate responsibilities at random; the patients participated in the structuring of La Borde;(though, doctors and staff performed tasks such as drawing blood and washing dishes). Roles were continually redistributed to prevent the consolidation of institutional authority.

The La Borde Clinic represented a break from traditional psychiatric institutions. The rigid, isolated spaces and strict hierarchies that define conventional psychiatric care were dismantled. La Borde offered patients the material and social conditions for creation — whether through art, collective life, or simply living without repression imposed by an external authority.

Deleuze and Guattari speak highly of La Borde by highlighting how its first task was to isolate how group fantasy differed from individual fantasy.

They write:

It became evident that group fantasy was inseparable from the “symbolic” articulations that define a social field insofar as it is real, whereas the individual fantasy fitted the whole of this field over “imaginary” givens. (AO, 62)

Deleuze and Guattari critique the psychoanalytic tendency to treat individual fantasy as something that merely overlays an already existing social field through imaginary identifications. For example, figures such as “the father” appear as stable roles governed by normative expectations — these “imaginary givens” are projected onto social reality. Instead, Deleuze and Guattari argue that group fantasy is what produces these roles in the first place. Group fantasy is inseparable from “symbolic articulations”: rules, language, norms, and institutional positions that constitute the social field as real.

The social field is not an abstract canvas onto which fantasy is projected; it is fully real. And it is this reality that is produced through group fantasy. Fantasy was never individual, nor was it a matter of symbolic or imaginary layers merely papering over the real. They say:

If this first distinction is drawn out, we see that the individual fantasy is itself plugged into the existing social field, but apprehends it in the form of imaginary qualities that confer on it a kind of transcendence or immortality under the shelter of which the individual, the ego, plays out its pseudo destiny: what does it matter if I die, says the general, since the Army is immortal? (AO, 62)

The first distinction concerns the group fantasy being inseperable from the real social field and individual fantasy being predicated on “imaginary givens.” Group fantasy is inseparable from the real social field, insofar as it participates in the ‘symbolic’ organization of institutions, roles, and collective practices. Individual fantasy functions as an imaginary overlay of this field, composed of identifications. Yet Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that individual fantasy is never detached from the social field; it must always be plugged into an already existing social reality.

The problem is that individual fantasy does not apprehend the social field as a contingent sociohistorical structure. Instead, it experiences that field as transcendent and immortal. Although institutions are historically produced and finite, individual fantasy confers upon them an imagined permanence. The example of the soldier dying is important. The Army, sovereignty, and hegemony are produced through group fantasies embedded in real institutions, yet the individual soldier identifies with the Army’s imagined immortality. Hence, why the solider feels comfortable dying as the solider finds the Army to live on.

They write:

The imaginary dimension of the individual fantasy has a decisive importance over the death instinct, insofar as the immortality conferred on the existing social order carried into the ego all the investments of repression, the phenomena of identification, of “superegoization” and castration, all the resignation-desires (becoming a general; acquiring low, middle, or high rank), including the resignation to dying in the service of this order, whereas the drive itself is projected onto the outside and turned against the others (death to the foreigner, to those who are not of our own ranks!). (AO, 62)

Deleuze and Guattari critique Freud’s claim that human behavior is fundamentally driven by a biological death instinct. Rather than locating repression, hierarchy, and sacrifice in an innate drive toward self-destruction, they argue that imaginary identifications within individual fantasy are far more decisive. Individual fantasy takes real, historically contingent institutions and imagines them as transcendent and immortal. Once institutions are perceived as immortal, it follows that repression, obedience, and sacrifice appear meaningful and justified. The ego comes to invest in repression not because it is compelled by an instinct toward death, but because fantasy has endowed the social order with a higher, immortal significance.

To explain this process, Deleuze and Guattari draw on several psychoanalytic concepts.

• Identification refers to the ego’s attachment to particular roles or positions — soldier, colonel, citizen — through which individuals locate themselves within institutional hierarchies.
• Superegoization is the process by which external authority is internalized as moral obligation: the commands of the Army, for example, are adhered to by docile subjects.
• Castration, in this context, refers to the acceptance of lack and subordination as necessary and unavoidable.

All of these mechanisms operate because institutions are imagined as sacred and immortal. When Deleuze and Guattari speak of “resignation-desires,” they are not describing reluctant submission, but a libidinal investment in one’s place within a hierarchy — whether through aspiring to higher rank or accepting a lower position. This investment includes a willingness to die in the service of the social order. Fantasy thus gives death a meaning: dying becomes participation in an imagined immortality.

Thus, the death drive is not primary instinct that turns aggression inward. Rather, destruction is produced under conditions of repression and then projected outward. Because the social order itself is imagined as eternal, aggression cannot be directed against it and is instead displaced onto others. Xenophobia, militarism, imperialism, and settler colonial violence are not expressions of a natural drive toward death, but the externalization of destruction away from the social system and onto those positioned outside its ranks.

Deleuze and Guattari continue by rereading Freud’s death instinct more clearly:

The revolutionary pole of group fantasy becomes visible, on the contrary, in the power to experience institutions themselves as mortal, to destroy them or change them according to the articulations of desire and the social field, by making the death instinct into a veritable institutional creativity. (AO, 62–63)

Here, there is no denial of the existence of a drive toward death. Deleuze and Guattari explicitly affirm that desire desires death just as much as it desires life. The issue, however, is understanding desire as a productive force and how destruction operationalizes. The death drive is not a natural instinct oriented toward destruction; it is a capacity whose orientation is dependent on how desire is organized within the social field.

In its reactionary form, the death drive operates when institutions are imagined as immortal. Under these conditions, desire cannot act upon the social order itself, and destructive force is displaced outward onto others. Violence is redirected toward foreigners and those positioned outside the dominant order, while the institutions that produce repression remain intact. By contrast, the revolutionary aspect of group fantasy experiences institutions as mortal. Institutions are no longer treated as eternal, but as contingent and transformable. In this view, the death drive is redirected toward institutions themselves, making it possible to destroy or transform them “according to the articulations of desire.” The death instinct is no longer understood through individual fantasy or biological reductionism, but as a form of institutional creativity — a force capable of de-organizing rigid structures and opening the social field to new arrangements.

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

For that is precisely the criterion — at least the formal criterion — that distinguishes the revolutionary institution from the enormous inertia which the law communicates to institutions in an established order. (AO, 63)

To clarify, this passage is where Deleuze and Guattari consolidate their second difference between individual fantasy and group fantasy. To sum up, individual fantasy corresponds to a reactionary — or paranoiac — pole that imagines institutions as immortal. This imaginary permanence legitimates hierarchy and repression, while channeling destructive force outward toward foreigners, enemies, or those deemed outside the social order. By contrast, group fantasy at its revolutionary pole conceptualizes institutions as mortal. Institutions can be destroyed, transformed, or reconfigured. In this sense, the death drive is no longer understood as a biological instinct or an ego-centered fantasy, but is reread as a form of institutional creativity — a force capable of de-organizing rigid structures.

At any rate, the quote above emphasizes the importance of the “enormous inertia” that stands opposed to such revolutionary transformation. The law functions as the mechanism that communicates permanence to institutions, rendering them fairly resistant to revolutionary movements. It is this juridical inertia, rather than the absence of revolutionary desire, that sustains established social orders.

Deleuze and Guattari conclude this paragraph with a reference to Friedrich Nietzsche:

As Nietzsche says; churches, armies, States — which of all these dogs wants to die? (AO, 63)

This reference is drawn from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883). The passage reads as follows:

But this advice I give to kings and churches and to all that is feeble with age and feeble in virtue — just let yourselves be overthrown! So that you might come to life again, and to you — virtue!’ –

Thus I spoke before the fire hound, then it interrupted me sullenly and asked: ‘Church? What is that?’

‘Church?’ I answered, ‘that is a kind of state, and in fact the most lying kind. But be silent, you hypocrite hound! You already know your kind best!

Like you yourself the state is a hypocrite hound; like you it likes to speak with smoke and bellowing — to make believe, like you, that it speaks from the belly of things.

For it wants absolutely to be the most important animal on earth, this state; and people believe it, too.’ –

(Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 104)

In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the dog functions as an allegorical figure, representing the nation-state, nationalism, mass belief, and institutional power broadly. Deleuze and Guattari reference this passage to highlight how these institutions seeks to present themselves as “the most important animal[s] on earth.” There is no church or army that desires its own dissolution; they all strive for immortality.

Paragraph Thirteen

To continue:

There results a third difference between group fantasy and the so-called individual fantasy. (AO, 63)

Deleuze and Guattari move to explain the third difference between group fantasy and the supposed individual fantasy:

The latter has as subject the ego, insofar as it is determined by the legal and legalized institutions in which it “imagines itself,” to the point where, even in its perversions, the ego conforms to the exclusive use of the disjunctions imposed by the law (for example, Oedipal homosexuality). (AO, 63)

In individual fantasy, the ego appears as the subject: a personal “I,” a fixed and pre-given subject. What is crucial, however, is Deleuze and Guattari’s insistence that this ego does not exist a priori. Rather, the ego is produced and determined by “legal and legalized institutions,” through which the ego is fabricated via imaginary identifications. The “I” takes form as man or woman, American or foreigner, rich or poor — identity categories that are juridically and socially organized. In this sense, the ego is a juridical product.

Therefore, fantasy does not escape the law or precede it; the two are co-constitutive. Individual fantasy operates precisely by imagining itself within the frameworks established by law and institutional norms. For this reason, Deleuze and Guattari note that even when the ego appears to transgress or escape these norms — what psychoanalysis would call perversions — it nonetheless remains confined to the law’s structure. Such fantasies conform to an exclusive use of disjunctions imposed by the law, rather than an inclusive one. Their example of Oedipal homosexuality makes this clear. Although homosexuality may appear to deviate from normative structures, within individual fantasy it is still interpreted through the Oedipal framework.

Group fantasy is different:

But group fantasy no longer has anything but the drives themselves as subject, and the desiring-machines formed by them with the revolutionary institutions. (AO, 63)

Group fantasy does not concern fixed egos or a personalized “I.” Desiring-machines are at the forefront; specifically, their relation to revolutionary investments. Deleuze and Guattari write:

The group fantasy includes the disjunctions, in the sense that each subject, discharged of his personal identity but not of his singularities, enters into relations with others following the communication proper to partial objects: everyone passes into the body of the other on the body without organs. (AO, 63)

Group fantasy operates through inclusive disjunctions. This does not mean that differences are abolished; instead, personalized identities are abolished. Difference persists, but it is no longer fixed into stable ego-identities. Group fantasy allows singularities — capacities, affects, functions — to circulate without being owned by an ego. Within this framework, relations occur through the “communication proper to partial objects.” Once there is no fixed, personalized subject, functions and capacities are no longer privatized. Seeing, speaking, acting, etc. are no longer attributes of an individual ego but shared operations that pass between subjects.

We are thus operating at the level of a group subject, where “everyone passes into the body of the other on the body without organs.” Just as in the case of A Child is Being Beaten, the boy can only see by becoming girl; in group fantasy, subjects enter into one another not as fixed identities, but as mobile singularities on the body without organs.

Paragraph Fourteen

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

In this respect Klossowski has convincingly shown the inverse relationship that pulls the fantasy in two directions, as the economic law establishes perversion in the “psychic exchanges,” or as the psychic exchanges on the contrary promote a subversion of the law: “Anachronistic, relative to the institutional level of gregariousness, the singular state can, according to its more or less forceful intensity, bring about a deactualization of the institution itself and denounce it in turn as anachronistic.” (AO, 63)

• There is an endnote that states: Pierre Klossowski, Nietzsche et le cercle vicieux (Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle) (Paris: Mercure de France, 1969), p. 122. Klossowski’s meditation on the relationship between drives and institutions, and on the presence of the drives in the economic infrastructure itself, is developed in his article “Sade et Fourier,” Topique, no. 4–5, and especially in La monnaie vivante (The Living Currency) (Paris: Losfeld, 1970).”

Deleuze and Guattari are showing an inverse relationship between law and fantasy. On one pole, law organizes desire by inducing fantasy to invest repression, such that institutions appear eternal or immortal. This is the artificially produced “individual” fantasy — not literally individual, but socially produced and sustained at the level of belief. On the other pole, fantasy experiences law as contingent and historical, making it possible to transgress, de-actualize, or destroy institutions themselves. This is what Deleuze and Guattari call “group fantasy.” In developing this distinction, they draw on Pierre Klossowski’s Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969), along with his essay Sade and Fourier (1963) and his later text Living Currency (1970), where he shows that the same libidinal force can either uphold institutions anachronistically through belief and repetition, or, when it becomes incompatible with those institutions, denounce them as historically contingent.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

The two kinds of fantasy, or rather the two regimes, are therefore distinguished according to whether the social production of “goods” imposes its rule on desire through the intermediary of an ego whose fictional unity is guaranteed by the goods themselves, or whether the desiring-production of affects imposes its rule on institutions whose elements are no longer anything but drives. (AO, 63)

There are two distinct regimes of fantasy. The first concerns the social production of “goods” — not only commodities in the economic sense, but norms, roles, and, most importantly, identity categories. Within this regime, the ego appears as an inherent and unified entity, stabilized through socially produced classifications such as professions, nationalities, and social roles. Desire is structured and subordinated to these forms. This is why Deleuze and Guattari describe the ego as a “fictional unity”: its coherence is not primary, but an effect of social norms and institutional arrangements that retroactively guarantee its stability.

The second regime stands in an inverse relation to the first. Here, desire produces affects that impose themselves upon institutions rather than being regulated by them. Institutions are no longer treated as primary, transcendent structures; instead, they are understood as effects of desiring-production itself. Economic and political forms are not external frameworks that organize desire from the outside, but contingent crystallizations of drives. Desire belongs to the infrastructure: it is immanent to social production and generates both the mechanisms of repression within institutions and the forces capable of undoing them.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

If we must still speak of Utopia in this sense, a la Fourier, it is most assuredly not as an ideal model, but as revolutionary action and passion. (AO, 63)

Utopia, in this sense, is not an imagined or idealized model of a determinate social order. Charles Fourier is important on this point. In the nineteenth century, Fourier proposed the phalanstère, a concrete communal form in which people live and work together, reorganizing labor and social relations around cooperation. Although the phalanstère took architectural form, its significance did not lie in the building itself or in its replication as a model, but in its function as an experimental arrangement for collective life and production. Deleuze and Guattari draw from Fourier — not to propose an “ideal model” for society — but to emphasize utopia as “revolutionary action and passion.” Utopia refuses a fixed model; it is an immanent practice of social experimentation.

Deleuze and Guattari continue to write about Klossowski:

In his recent works Klossowski indicates to us the only means of bypassing the sterile parallelism where we flounder between Freud and Marx: by discovering how social production and relations of production are an institution of desire, and how affects or drives form part of the infrastructure itself. (AO, 63)

This quote highlights a tension in political theory between Freud and Marx, or more precisely between the libidinal economy and the political economy. Deleuze and Guattari argue that we “flounder” between Freud and Marx because each treats a different domain as fundamental: Freud privileges psychic life and libidinal drives, while Marx privileges institutions, labor, and material relations of production. As long as these domains remain parallel but separate, neither can adequately account for the other. Rather than choosing between them, Deleuze and Guattari seek to dissolve the division by showing that social production is desiring-production under determinate conditions.

They write:

For they are part of it, they are present there in every way while creating within the economic forms their own repression, as well as the means for breaking this repression. (AO, 63)

Desiring-production, affects, and drives serve as the infrastructure; desire is materially present and produces social arrangements. Repression is not external and imposed from above (state, law, ideology) and it is only a result of how desire is invested. However, desire also serves as the means of rupture — it has the capacity to destabilize supposedly ‘fixed’ institutions.

Paragraph Fifteen

To continue:

The development of distinctions between group and individual fantasy shows sufficiently well, at last, that there is no individual fantasy. (AO, 64)

Earlier, we identified three distinctions between group fantasy and individual fantasy. First, group fantasy conceptualizes institutions as mortal, whereas individual fantasy treats them as immortal. Second, the revolutionary pole of group fantasy reveals this mortality and seeks to destabilize institutions, while individual fantasy remains fundamentally reactionary, oriented toward preserving institutions and their presumed permanence. Third, individual fantasy maintains an ego-centered subject, whereas group fantasy decenters the subject.

Once this distinction is examined in terms of the collapse between libidinal economy and political economy, the opposition begins to dissolve. Therefore, there is no individual fantasy. What appears as individual fantasy is produced only secondarily, as an effect of social arrangements and institutional formations. Fantasy is always collective: there has only ever been group fantasy.

If distinctions can be drawn between individual and group fantasy, yet no genuine individual fantasy exists, how are we to understand this apparent contradiction? Deleuze and Guattari write:

Instead there are two types of groups, subject-groups and subjugated groups, with Oedipus and castration forming the imaginary structure under which members of the subjugated groups are induced to live or fantasize individually their membership in the group. (AO, 64)

There are two kinds of groups. The first are subject-groups, which are not organized through imaginary structures or fixed representations. The second are subjugated groups, organized around hierarchy and representation. In subjugated groups, Oedipus and castration function as mechanisms of organization: they install an imaginary framework that produces personalized egos, translating social repression into internalized self-discipline. They write:

It must still be said that the two types of groups are perpetually shifting, a subject-group always being threatened with subjugation, a subjugated group capable in certain cases of being forced to take on a revolutionary role. (AO, 64)

None of the earlier analysis suggests that subject-groups or subjugated groups are fixed entities. On the contrary, they are “perpetually shifting,” existing in a constant state of flux. Subject-groups are always threatened by the possibility of becoming subjugated — repressed and organized within hierarchical and representational frameworks. Conversely, subjugated groups maintain the capacity to assume a revolutionary role, dismantling the apparatuses that produce their subjugation.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

It is therefore all the more disturbing to see to what extent Freudian analysis retains from the fantasy only its lines of exclusive disjunction, and flattens it into its individual or pseudoindividual dimensions, which by their very nature refer the fantasy to subjugated groups, rather than carrying out the opposite operation and disengaging in the fantasy the underlying element of a revolutionary group potential. (AO, 64)

Freudian analysis is disturbing. In analyzing fantasy, Freud does not treat group fantasy as primary; instead, fantasy is read exclusively through exclusive disjunctions — one is either boy or girl — and is flattened into personalized egos and “pseudo-individual dimensions.” Freud fails to recognize that his analysis does not concern individual fantasy, but rather the fantasy proper to subjugated groups. Unfortunately, Freud refuses the operation that uncovers revolutionary potential of group fantasy to dismantle this subjugation.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

When we learn that the instructor, the teacher, is daddy, and the colonel too, and also the mother — when all the agents of social production and anti production are in this way reduced to the figures of familial reproduction — we can understand why the panicked libido no longer risks abandoning Oedipus, and internalizes it. (AO, 64)

When instructors, teachers, bosses, and colonels all assume the position of the father — when the agents of social production and antiproduction, the machines that produce the socius and the body without organs, are reduced to familial representations — there is no reason for libido to break with Oedipus. Desire is crushed and the only remaining option is internalization: social repression becomes psychic structure. They write:

The libido internalizes it in the form of a castrating duality between the subject of the statement (I’enonce) and the subject of the enunciation, as is characteristic of the pseudoindividual fantasy (“I, as a man, understand you, but as judge, as boss, as colonel or general, that is to say as the father, I condemn you”). (AO, 64)

• I highly recommend reading this article in tandem with the analysis below.

To understand this passage, we must begin by examining linguistics and psychoanalysis. French linguist Émile Benveniste distinguishes between the statement (what is said) and enunciation (the act and position of saying it). Jacques Lacan uses this distinction to theorize the split subject of the unconscious.

For Lacan, the subject of the statement is the “I” that appears in speech and can be equated with the ego — the subject as it appears to itself. However, this “I” has no meaning on its own; it is merely a signifier and does not refer to a unified subject. Its meaning depends entirely on the position from which it is spoken. That context is provided by the subject of enunciation: the position from which speech occurs. For example, the “I” is followed by “am a X” (“I am a student.”).

For example, take a manager who says:

I personally sympathize with your reason for being late to work, but as your manager, I have to fire you.

Clearly, the words are uttered by the same mouth — there are not two different people. Yet two positions are at work in the speech. On the one hand, there is the subject of the statement: the “I” that personally sympathizes. On the other, there is the subject of enunciation: the position of the manager from which the statement is issued. The split does not occur between two individuals, but between what is said and the position from which it is said. For Lacan, this is the fractured (or split) subject.

Deleuze and Guattari show how libido internalizes the socially imposed Oedipus, producing a split between the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation. The “I” functions as a signifier that can attach itself to different positions within speech. When they write: “I, as a man, understand you,” they are referring to the subject of the statement — the individualized, empathetic ego. When they continue, “but as judge, as boss, as colonel or general, that is to say as the father, I condemn you,” they are referring to the subject of enunciation, the institutional position from which authority speaks. Psychoanalysis, then, takes this socially produced split and treats it as a fundamental structure of subjectivity, rather than as the internalization of institutional power characteristic of subjugated groups.

They write:

But this duality is artificial, derived, and supposes a direct relationship proceeding from the statement to the collective agents of enunciation in the group fantasy. (AO, 64)

Deleuze and Guattari emphasize that the duality between the subject of the statement and the subject of enunciation is not primary but secondary, produced under specific social conditions. The split is derived from what they call “collective agents of enunciation in the group fantasy”— that is, institutions and social machines that speak through particular positions (such as the law speaking through a judge or the military speaking through an officer).

Paragraph Sixteen

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

Institutional analysis tries to trace its difficult path between the repressive asylum and the legalistic hospital on the one hand, and contractual psychoanalysis on the other. (AO, 64)

Institutional analysis refuses to situate pathology within a fixed subject or individualized psyche. Instead, it attempts to analyze institutions at the level of social production. This analysis navigates a “difficult path”: on one side, there is the repressive structures of the psychiatric asylum. On the other side lies contractual psychoanalysis, which reduces the practice to a private agreement between analyst and analysand.

From the outset, the psychoanalytic relationship modeled itself after the contractual relationship of the most traditional bourgeois medicine: the feigned exclusion of a third party; the hypocritical role of money, to which psychoanalysis brought farcical new justifications; the pretended time limitation that contradicts itself by reproducing a debt to infinity, by feeding an inexhaustible transference, and by always nursing new “conflicts.” (AO, 64)

From the outset, the psychoanalytic relationship is contractual, modeled on the practices of “traditional bourgeois medicine.” This model is characterized by several features. First, there is the exclusion of a third party: an exclusive relationship between doctor and patient, accessible only to those with the means to participate. Second, there is the role of money, where payment structures the relationship and produces hierarchy (raising the question of why certain analysts command higher fees than others). Third, there is the question of time. Psychoanalysis presents itself as a limited therapeutic service, yet it simultaneously generates an effectively infinite duration.

The problem that brings the patient to analysis is never resolved so much as displaced: once a conflict appears settled, it reemerges elsewhere, causing the payment of further sessions. Anxiety about a boss may be resolved only to reappear as conflict with a spouse, a child, or another authority figure. They write:

We are astonished when we hear that a terminated analysis is by that very fact a failure, even if this proposition is accompanied by the analyst’s little smile. (AO, 64)

Psychoanalysis treats the termination of analysis as failure, revealing that it is not oriented toward genuine resolution. Success is instead measured by continued attachment to the analytic process itself. When they refer to the “analyst’s little smile,” they are signaling the posture of benevolent authority: the analyst appears understanding while waiting for the analysand to open their wallet again in the future. Deleuze and Guattari write:

We are surprised when we hear a knowledgeable analyst mention, in passing, that one of his “patients” still dreams of being invited to eat or have a drink at his place, after several years of analysis, as if this were not a tiny sign of the abject dependence to which analysis reduced the patients. (AO, 64–65)

What should be alarming has become normalized. A seasoned analyst casually remarks, in passing, that a former analysand dreams of being invited to eat or drink at the analyst’s home — even after several years of analysis. Deleuze and Guattari place “patients” in quotation marks to signal this ambiguity. Either the individual is no longer a literal patient in the sense of payment, or the individual was never simply a patient at all, but is instead produced as one by the psychoanalytic relationship itself. In either case, the dream points to what they refer to as an “abject dependence”: the patient is reduced to their relationship with the analyst.

They write:

How can we ward off, in the practice of the cure, this abject desire that makes us bend our knees, lays us on the couch, and makes us remain there? (AO, 65)

Deleuze and Guattari pose an integral question: how can a practice of the cure avoid producing submission and hierarchy? They make clear that their critique is not aimed at individual analysts, but at the very structure of the analytic relation itself — one that generates abject dependence as a structural outcome. The problem, then, is whether it is possible to develop a form of care that does not lead one into submission, that does not fix the subject on the analyst’s couch, and that does not reproduce obedience as therapy.

Paragraph Seventeen

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

Let us consider a third and final text of Freud’s, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” (1937). (AO, 65)

• There is an endnote that provides the citation: “In Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (New York: Macmillan; London: Hogarth Press, 1974), Vol. 23. (Translators’ note: Hereafter this source will be cited as Standard Edition.)”

At this point, we have analyzed Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Schreber’s case) and A Child Is Being Beaten. The final text Deleuze and Guattari examine in this section is Freud’s Analysis Terminable and Interminable. Let’s review it now:

Interminable Analysis…

In Analysis Terminable and Interminable, Freud addresses the question of how long psychoanalysis must last in order to achieve a cure. The essay itself is relatively brief and does not presuppose extensive technical knowledge of Freudian theory. Nevertheless, Freud’s position — particularly his conclusion — has generated considerable confusion. For instance, Freud writes:

… in every phase of the patient’s recovery we have to fight against his inertia, which is ready to be content with an incomplete solution. (Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

In Freud’s account, recovery remains fundamentally ambiguous: the patient is continually drawn toward premature closure, and resistance to completing analysis persists at every stage. Not only does Freud attribute resistance to the patient, he also acknowledges a danger intrinsic to analytic practice itself:

We know, for instance, that a patient who has recovered from scarlet fever is immune to a return of the same illness; yet it never occurs to a doctor to take a healthy person who may possibly fall ill of scarlet fever and infect him with scarlet fever in order to make him immune to it.

The protective measure must not produce the same situation of danger as is produced by the illness itself, but only something very much slighter, as is the case with vaccination against smallpox and many other similar procedures. (Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

Freud raises a concern about the role of repressed material within analysis. Even if analysis successfully resolves the issue that initially brings a patient to treatment, this resolution does not preclude other repressed desires from emerging. To illustrate this, Freud invokes the analogy of scarlet fever: although a patient may recover from the illness, this does not render them immune — yet no physician would deliberately infect a healthy person with scarlet fever in order to secure immunity.

From this, Freud entertains the idea that the analyst may need to bring certain repressed material to the foreground of analysis — not necessarily with the same magnitude as the original conflict, but still deliberately. This is akin to someone receiving a vaccination against a weaker illness.

Further still:

This therefore leaves only the one method open to us — the one which was in all probability the only one originally contemplated.

We tell the patient about the possibilities of other instinctual conflicts, and we arouse his expectation that such conflicts may occur in him.

(Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

This passage is revealing of Freud’s project. Psychoanalysis is not oriented toward definitive cure so much as toward preparing the patient for the recurrence of conflict. If analysis is oriented less toward definitive cure than toward preparing the patient for the recurrence of conflict, this preparatory function requires an asymmetry of authority. Freud is explicit on this point:

… [the analyst] must possess some kind of superiority, so that in certain analytic situations [they] can act as a model for his patient and in others as a teacher. (Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

Analysis is structured by a hierarchical relationship whereby the analyst is positioned as having authority. This hierarchy is embedded in the practice.

However, this hierarchy does not render the analyst immune. Freud acknowledges that analysts themselves remain subject to destructive drives and impulses that may interfere with the analytic process. In response to this problem, Freud offers a solution:

Every analyst should periodically — at intervals of five years or so — submit himself to analysis once more, without feeling ashamed of taking this step. This would mean, then, that not only the therapeutic analysis of patients but his own analysis would change from a terminable into an interminable task. (Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

…

At this point, however, we must guard against a misconception. I am not intending to assert that analysis is altogether an endless business. (Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

…

It would be hard to say whether and when we have succeeded in mastering this factor in an analytic treatment. (Analysis Terminable and Interminable)

Freud maintains that analysts themselves must periodically submit to analysis — at one point suggesting an interval of five years. Far from being shameful or delegitimizing, this requirement is framed as part of a lifelong analytic discipline. At the same time, Freud insists that analysis should not be endless. Yet this insistence sits alongside his admission, toward the end of the essay, that it is “hard to say” whether an analysis has in fact been successfully completed.

The essay bears the mark of an unresolved, structural tension. Most likely, Freud was grappling with the problem of what constitutes proper analysis and how long it ought to last. Ultimately, Freud rejects interminable analysis in principle while advancing a framework in which no stable criterion of completion can be secured.

… Terminated Analysis

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

We prefer not to follow a recent suggestion that it would be better to translate “Analysis Finite, Analysis Infinite,” since finite-infinite is almost mathematics or logic, whereas the problem is particularly practical and concrete. (AO, 65)

The “recent suggestion” Deleuze and Guattari reference is Lacan’s proposal, advanced in Seminar V on April 16, 1958. In this seminar, Lacan states:

One cannot fail to be struck that one of Freud’s last articles, the one that has been improperly translated as Analysis terminable or interminable, in reality concerns the finite or the infinite. It is a matter of analysis insofar as it ends or insofar as it must be situated within a kind of infinite scope. That is what is at issue. (Seminar V)

Lacan argues that Analysis Terminable or Interminable is a misleading translation, and that Freud’s essay should instead be read as Analysis Finite or Infinite. Where Freud appears to ask whether analysis comes to an end or continues indefinitely, Lacan insists that this is the wrong question. Desire never becomes complete or resolved in the sense that it ceases to be structured by lack. Rather, analysis may terminate as a practical and institutional process, even as it reveals a structure of desire that remains inexhaustible.

However, Deleuze and Guattari critique this translation because the terms “finite” and “infinite” shift the discussion into an abstract or logical register, whereas the stakes of analysis are “practical and concrete.” They ask a slew of rhetorical questions to further their point:

Does this story have an ending?

Can an analysis be ended, can the process of analysis be terminated, yes or no?

Can it be completed, or is it condemned to a constant self-perpetuation?

As Freud says, can a currently given “conflict” be exhausted, can the one who is sick be forewarned against ulterior conflicts, can even new conflicts be awakened for a preventive purpose? (AO, 65)

Nowhere in Freud’s account — nor in Lacan’s reformulation — is the precise endpoint of analysis specified. Does analysis end, or does it not? For Deleuze and Guattari, this is a question that ought to admit a straightforward “yes or no.” Yet, both on its face and in practice, psychoanalysis appears structurally self-perpetuating. Even Freud himself vacillates on this point: he repeatedly poses the question of whether treatment should aim to inoculate the patient against future conflicts, or instead seek out repressed material, bring it to the surface, and work through it as it emerges. The essay thus accumulates questions without delivering stable criteria of resolution:

A great beauty animates this text of Freud’s: an undefined something that is hopeless, disenchanted, tired, and at the same time a serenity, a certitude in the finished work.

It is Freud’s testament.

He is going to die, and knows it.

He knows something is wrong in psychoanalysis.

The cure tends to be more and more interminable!

He knows that soon he will no longer be there to see how things are going.

(AO, 65)

Deleuze and Guattari emphasize the affective charge that runs through Freud’s essay, noting a range of emotions from hopelessness and restraint to a refusal of false optimism. The text bears the marks of exhaustion as Freud no longer writes with confidence that psychoanalysis can fully deliver on its promises. The essay is emblematic of the analytic project: something is wrong.

When Deleuze and Guattari write that Freud is “going to die, and knows it,” the claim is both literal and figurative. Literally, Freud was seriously ill and likely knew that this would be among his final major works. Figuratively, Freud appears skeptical of his own project and its conclusions. He senses that something within psychoanalysis is beyond correction — it will die. Much like his literal illness, the cure forwarded by psychoanalysis tends toward interminability, and Freud is aware that he will not be present to witness what psychoanalysis ultimately becomes.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

So he takes stock of the obstacles to treatment, with the serenity of the person who senses what a treasure his work is, but senses too the poisons that have already filtered in. (AO, 65)

It is evident that in Analysis: Terminable and Interminable, Freud is taking inventory of the limits of psychoanalysis. He does not resolve these limits; rather, he names them. Though, Freud does remain aware of the intellectual breakthrough that is psychoanalysis (“a treasure”). Yet this recognition is accompanied by an awareness that something within psychoanalysis has become problematic. The “poisons” refer to the structural tendencies embedded in analytic practice: interminability, the overt hierarchical authority of the analyst, etc.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

Everything would be fine if the economic problem of desire were merely quantitative; it would be a matter of reinforcing the ego against the drives.

The celebrated strong, mature ego, the “contract,” the “pact” between the analyst and an ego that is normal in spite of everything …

(AO, 65)

If desire were understood solely in quantitative terms, these anxieties would disappear. If the problem consisted in excessively strong drives or insufficient ego control, the solution would be straightforward: reinforce the ego and weaken or redirect the drives. Once desire is treated as quantitative, psychoanalysis naturally installs the ego as its object of study and structures the analytic relation as contractual. In this case, analysis would amount to a task of restoring equilibrium.

But it is not that easy:

Except that there are qualitative factors in the desiring-economy that indeed present an obstacle to treatment, and Freud reproaches himself for not having taken them sufficiently into account. (AO, 65)

Psychoanalysis fails to account for the qualitative factors of desire. The problem is not merely quantitative — “how much drive is present” — but of form: how desire operates, organizes, and its relationship with authority, hierarchy, and social relations writ large. Freud comes to recognize this limitation, but too late for it to be corrected within the analytic framework he established.

Paragraph Eighteen

Deleuze and Guattari continue by describing three qualitative factors that designate the desiring-economy:

The first of these factors is the “rock” of castration, the rock with two nonsymmetrical faces, which creates in us an incurable alveous, and against which the analyst stumbles. (AO, 65)

The first qualitative factor of the desiring-economy is the “rock” of castration. In Freud’s framework, this is not a question of too much or too little libido (i.e., it is not quantitative). Castration is a structural impasse built into psychoanalysis. Its “nonsymmetrical faces” refer to two irreducible positions: on one side, the fear of castration; on the other, the acknowledgment of having been castrated. Castration does not function as a singular trauma that can be resolved or healed, but as an “incurable alveous” — a hollow carved into desire.

Furthermore:

The second is a qualitative aptitude for conflict, which means that the quantity of libido does not branch into two variable forces corresponding to heterosexuality and homosexuality, but creates in most people irreducible oppositions between the two forces. (AO, 65)

The second qualitative factor of the desiring-economy is an “aptitude for conflict.” If this were a question of quantity, heterosexual and homosexual investments would appear as variable proportions, allowing libido to shift smoothly between them. This means that conflict would be reducible to imbalance — more heterosexual than homosexual investment, or vice versa — and could be resolved through redistribution. Yet Freud’s own clinical account undermines this quantitative schema: he concedes that libido does not produce proportions but “irreducible oppositions,” such that conflict is structural rather than contingent.

This is the problem: Freud continues to conceptualize desire in quantitative, economic terms even as his own clinical observations allow him to acknowledge qualitative structures that this quantitative model cannot accommodate.

At any rate:

Finally, the third factor — of such economic importance that it outweighs the dynamic and topical considerations — concerns a type of resistance that is nonlocalizable. (AO, 65)

The third qualitative factor of the desiring-economy is extremely important. Unlike dynamic considerations (which analyze conflict as a struggle between forces) or topical considerations (which locate these conflicts within the psychic apparatus (id, ego, superego)), this third factor concerns resistance. Freud acknowledges something paramount: even when the conflict is perfectly understood at the dynamic level, and even when its elements are precisely located topically, the cure can still fail. Deleuze and Guattari elaborate on this third factor more explicitly:

It would seem that certain subjects have such a viscous libido, or on the contrary such a liquid one, that nothing succeeds in “taking hold.” (AO, 65)

In the case of subjects with a “viscous” or “liquid” libido, the material consistency of desire itself blocks the analytic cure. A viscous libido is resistant to movement: it is rigid, fixed, and immobile, meaning that no interpretation succeeds in displacing it. By contrast, a liquid libido is excessively fluid and resists interpretation for the opposite reason — nothing remains stable long enough for analysis to take hold. This is why Deleuze and Guattari characterizes these kinds of resistances as nonlocalizable: it is not tied to a specific conflict, defense, or psychic site, nor is it something that interpretation can uncover or resolve. They write:

It would be a mistake to see in this remark of Freud’s nothing more than an observation of detail, a mere anecdote.

In fact, it concerns what is most essential in the phenomenon of desire: the qualitative flows of the libido. (AO, 65–66)

What Freud says about resistance — and about the challenge that viscous and liquid libidos pose for analysis — should not be understood as a passing observation. These remarks are structurally decisive for the psychoanalytic project itself. Psychoanalysis has a strong incentive to discard the notion of viscous and liquid libido, since it does not fit neatly within a quantitative model of desire. For Deleuze and Guattari, however, this is not a secondary detail but an essential feature of desire.

—

To avoid any confusion: Freud approaches psychoanalysis from the standpoint of a quantitative desiring-economy. Desire is treated as libidinal energy that can be distributed, balanced, reinforced, or depleted. Yet, Freud himself repeatedly encounters phenomena that cannot be accounted for within this quantitative framework. Deleuze and Guattari isolate three moments — the rock of castration, an irreducible aptitude for conflict, and a nonlocalizable resistance tied to the consistency of libidinal flow — all of which operate at a qualitative level. Taken together, these factors demonstrate that desire cannot be understood solely in quantitative terms.

Paragraph Nineteen

To continue:

In some fine pages, Andre Green recently took up the question again by making up a list of three types of “sessions,” the first two of which comprise counterindications, the third alone constituting the ideal session in analysis. (AO, 66)

• There is a footnote at the end of this sentence in the original French: André Green, L’Affect, p, U. P., 1970, pp. 154–168.

At this juncture, after Freud has already encountered the structural limits of psychoanalysis, Deleuze and Guattari show how psychoanalysis responds to these limits by normativizing them. They cite André Green (1927–2012), a French psychoanalyst. Rather than asking why analysis as a model fails, Green asks which analytic sessions count as valid. In his typology, the first two types of sessions are classified as “counterindications” — cases that should not properly be treated. These correspond to what Freud described as viscous and liquid libido: in the first, desire is too rigid to be displaced; in the second, it is too fluid to be anchored. Only the third type of session, in which desire already conforms to the analytic model, is considered ideal for analysis.

Let’s begin with the viscous type:

According to Type I (viscosity, resistance of a hysterical form), “the session is dominated by a heavy, weighty, boggy climate. The silences are leaden, the discourse is dominated by the events of the day, … is uniform, it is a descriptive narration where no reference to the past is disclosable, it unfolds along a continuous thread, unable to allow itself any break. …Dreams are narrated, … the enigma of dream is taken up in the secondary elaboration that makes dream as narration and as event take precedence over dream as a working over of thoughts. … Sticky transference. …” (AO, 66)

• An endnote at the end of this sentence says: Andre Green, L’affect (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1970), pp. 154–68.

Type I (the viscous libido) is described by Green as “heavy” and “weighty,” precisely because it resists movement. Silences in the session do not open space for thought or interpretation; desire remains immobile, stuck in place. Discourse is dominated by the “events of the day,” unfolding as a continuous, uniform narration with no break and no reference to the past. This viscous flow is continuous but unmoving. Whereas dreams ordinarily function as sites of unconscious work and interpretation, in the case of viscous libido they are reduced to stories or events, subordinated to secondary elaboration rather than opening onto unconscious processes. The transference is understood as “sticky” because the patient has a commitment to the analytic process but not transformation takes place.

For example, imagine a patient who enters the session and says, “I woke up late today… I went to work…. Then I came here.” The statements are separated by long silences, but the narration remains continuous and uniform; nothing breaks or slips. When the patient reports a dream — let’s say it is about work — and the analyst asks whether it might express anger or anxiety toward a boss, the response is flat: “Not really. It’s just work.” What is noticeable here is the absence of displacement. Events remain events, descriptions remain descriptions, and neither speech nor silence opens a space for interpretation. Desire flows, but it remains immobile.

Let’s move to the liquid type:

According to Type II (liquidity, resistance of an obsessional form), “here the session is dominated by an extreme mobility of representations of all sorts, … the language is unfettered, rapid, almost torrential, … everything enters here, … the patient could just as easily say the opposite of everything he is uttering without changing anything fundamental to the analytic situation. … All of this is without consequence, since the analysis slides off the couch like water off a duck’s back. The unconscious does not cause anything to ‘stick,’ there is no anchoring in the transference. Here the transference is volatile. …” (AO, 66)

Type II (the liquid libido) is described by Green as “unfettered” and “rapid.” In this kind of session, nothing remains outside: representations proliferate endlessly, and desire is no longer immobile but hyper-mobile. The patient can utter contradictory statements without altering anything fundamental in the analytic situation, since no statement carries lasting consequence. Deleuze and Guattari capture this excessive fluidity with the idiom “like water off a duck’s back.” Transference here is not sticky, as in the case of viscous libido, but volatile.

For example, imagine a patient who enters the session and says, “I had a good week — though technically it was bad. I love my girlfriend, she’s perfect, but I might leave her. There’s a concert coming up and the music is bad, but it’s so bad that it’s good.” The statements come in rapid succession, riddled with contradictions that carry no weight. When the analyst intervenes — “You mentioned your girlfriend; does she remind you of your mother?” — the patient responds: “She might, sure. Or probably the opposite. I don’t know. It’s not important.” What is noticeable here is resistance through indifference. Desire moves freely, but nothing anchors, and the analytic situation remains unchanged.

The viscous and liquid libidos are classified as non-ideal configurations —failed forms of analysis. This raises a question: if these are the “bad”sessions, then what counts as a “good” session? Deleuze and Guattari write:

Only the third type remains, whose characteristics define a good analysis.

The patient “speaks in order to constitute the process of a chain of signifiers. The meaning is not attached to the signified to which each of the enunciated signifiers refers, but is constituted by process, suture, the concatenation of bound elements. . . . Every interpretation furnished by [the patient] can offer itself as an already-signified awaiting its meaning. For this reason interpretation is always retrospective, as the perceived meaning. So that was what this meant. …” (AO, 66)

Thus, a “good” form of analysis is one in which speech is organized into a specific signifying chain. Desire is no longer approached as a qualitative flow, but as something that can be articulated, linked, and rendered legible through signification. Where viscous libido cannot break into articulable chains, and liquid libido cannot hold such chains together, psychoanalysis defines the “good session” as one in which desire is already compatible with interpretation.

Green acknowledges that meaning is not fixed at the level of individual signifiers (“meaning is not attached to the signified…”), but emerges through the process by which signifying chains are constructed. However, even this apparently flexible account remains normative: although meaning is deferred and retrospective rather than immediate, it must still be capable of being organized into a coherent narrative after the fact. The successful analytic moment is one in which the subject can say, after the fact, “So that was what this meant.”

For example, imagine a patient who enters a session and is asked how their day went. They respond that it was bad because of work. When asked why, they mention their boss. The analyst then asks about family, and the patient notes a strained relationship with their father. Pressed further, the patient recalls that their father forced them to begin working at sixteen. At this point, the analyst can retroactively interpret the bad day at work as linked to the unresolved paternal relation. This is what counts as a “good” analysis: speech unfolds in a way that allows desire to be organized into a coherent chain of signifiers. Other configurations of desire — those that are viscous or liquid — are excluded.

Paragraph Twenty

Deleuze and Guattari continue:

What is serious is that Freud never questions the process of the cure. (AO, 66)

Freud is solely concerned with content — not form. He is critical about particular technical limits of psychoanalysis, but he never questions the foundation: the analyst remains authoritative, the analysand is a dependent subject, and the asymmetry in this analytic relationship is all too evident. They write:

Of course it is too late for him, but is it too late for those who come after him? (AO, 66)

As noted earlier, Freud wrote Analysis Terminable and Interminable toward the end of his life; he could not have resolved the tensions. The more pressing question concerns those who come after Freud — the post-Freudians. Yet, as we saw in the previous paragraph, even Green continued to reproduce the same structural failures. Deleuze and Guattari are asking something important: is psychoanalysis as a project is salvageable at all? They continue:

He interprets these things as obstacles to the cure, and not as shortcomings of the treatment itself, or as effects or countereffects of his method. (AO, 66)

Freud recognizes that there are serious problems within analytic practice, but he consistently misattributes their source. The difficulties he isolates are understood as obstacles that prevent psychoanalysis from reaching the cure, rather than as shortcomings of the treatment. Because these problems are not seen as intrinsic to psychoanalysis, Freud assumes they can be resolved or overcome through further technique. What is most powerful in this quote is the latter half: Freud does not question the effects produced by the process of the cure itself. He fails to consider that analysis may produce clinical entities of its own, along with the reactive formations — such as resistance to analysis — that arise in response to those effects.

Thus, Freud botches the three qualitative factors of the desiring-economy:

For castration as an analyzable state — or nonanalyzable; the ultimate rock — is the effect of castration as a psychoanalytic act. (First Factor)

And Oedipal homosexuality — the qualitative aptitude for conflict — is rather the effect of oedipalization, which the treatment does not invent, but precipitates and accentuates within the artificial conditions of its exercise (transference). (Second Factor)

And inversely, when flows of libido resist therapeutic practice, rather than being a resistance of the ego, this is the intense outcry of all of desiring-production. (Third Factor)

(AO, 66–67)

In each of these factors, psychoanalysis produces both the effect and its counter-effects:

• First, castration is not a pre-given psychic reality but an effect of psychoanalytic practice itself: it only comes into being insofar as lack is posited as an a priori condition of desire.
• Second, Oedipal homosexuality — understood as the organization of libido through oppositions and conflict — is an effect of oedipalization. Treated by analysis as an inevitable internal psychic configuration, it is reinforced within the artificial conditions of transference.
• Third, when libidinal flows resist analytic practice — whether in a viscous or liquid state — this resistance should be understood as a counter-effect.

To continue:

We already knew that the pervert resisted oedipalization: why should [the pervert] surrender, since [they have] invented for [themselves] other territorialities, more artificial still and more lunar than that of Oedipus? (AO, 67)

From the outset, it is obvious that the pervert does not submit to Oedipal triangulation. Freud interprets this refusal as pathological, whereas Deleuze and Guattari treat this as a simple state of affairs: the pervert does not organize desire according to the Oedipal schema. For psychoanalysis, to surrender to Oedipus is to accept lack and to organize desire around the familial drama. But if the pervert already refuses Oedipus and has instead constructed their own territorialities — arguably more artificial and more strange than Oedipus itself — there is no reason why they would ever agree to submit to Oedipus.

They move to discuss the schizo:

We knew the schizo was not oedipalizable, because [they are] beyond territoriality, because [they have] carried [their] flows right into the desert. (AO, 67)

Unlike the pervert, the schizo does not construct artificial territorialities, because they (the schizos) adhere to no limit. Their flows are no longer organized into territories at all, but are carried “right into the desert.”

They continue by asking an essential question:

But what remains, once we learn that “resistances” of an hysterical or an obsessional form bear witness to the anoedipal quality of the flows of desire on the very terrain of Oedipus? (AO, 67)

To understand this passage, it is necessary to understand how psychoanalysis conceives of resistance. Psychoanalysis identifies two primary forms of resistance — hysterical and obsessional — each of which is interpreted through an Oedipal framework. When desire appears conflicted, it manifests as a type of resistance, which is taken as evidence of Oedipal organization. For example, let’s take a patient who is hysterical in their resisting of treatment. An analyst, such as Freud, would understand this resistance as a result of not properly conforming to Oedipus.

Deleuze and Guattari reject this. They argue that even within the analytic setting, desire never fully submits to Oedipal coding nor confines itself entirely to familial organization. They read this resistance as evidence of desire not fitting seamlessly into the Oedipal frame. This is why they describe the qualitative flows of desire as “anoedipal” even on the terrain of Oedipus.

Thus, Deleuze and Guattari emphasize what a qualitative economy truly looks like:

That is precisely what qualitative economy shows: flows ooze, they traverse the triangle, breaking apart its vertices.

The Oedipal wad does not absorb these flows, any more than it could seal off a jar of jam or plug a dike.

Against the walls of the triangle, toward the outside, flows exert the irresistible pressure of lava or the invincible oozing of water. (AO, 67)

Oedipus can never fully contain desire because desire does not lend itself to neat triangulation. Desire is not a matter of quantity, nor of what it is meant to fit inside; it is a matter of operation. The more fundamental questions are not representational: what does desire do, and how does it function?

Paragraph Twenty-One

To continue:

What are the most favorable conditions for the cure, it is asked? (AO, 67)

Deleuze and Guattari move to ask what the “favorable conditions” for the cure look like. They write:

A flow that lets itself be plugged by Oedipus; partial objects that let themselves be subsumed under the category of a complete object, even if absent — the phallus of castration; breaks-flows that let themselves be projected onto a mythical space; polyvocal chains that let themselves be biunivocalized, linearized, suspended from a signifier; an unconscious that lets itself be expressed; connective syntheses that let themselves be taken in a global and specific use; disjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in an exclusive, restrictive use; conjunctive syntheses that let themselves be taken in a personal and segregative use. (AO, 67)

Quite sarcastically, Deleuze and Guattari lay out what erroneous psychoanalytic undertaking: a flow of desire is plugged by Oedipus, adhering to the vertices of the familial triangle. Partial objects are extracted from their multiplicity and elevated into the status of a complete object — the phallus — such that each object is defined by its lack of the others, and castration becomes the organizing principle.

Breaks within the flow — present across each of the syntheses — are no longer understood as productive but as lack, as are projected onto a mythical register, interpreted through Greek tragedy.

Polyvocal chains of desire, initially inclusive, are rendered exclusive: they become biunivocalized and suspended from a privileged signifier to which all others are subordinated. The unconscious is deemed an expressive system that conveniently “speaks” in a language already structured for interpretation.

Finally, conjunctive syntheses are not understood in terms of collective or group formations, but are reduced to individual fantasy. Group-subjects give way to subjugated groups, and desire is personalized under the authority of Oedipus. (Notice each of the three syntheses being misused in succession.)

They write:

For what is the meaning of “so that was what this meant”?

The crushing of the “so” onto Oedipus and castration. (AO, 67)

When Deleuze and Guattari ask what is meant by the phrase “so that was what this meant,” they are pointing to the retroactive operation of psychoanalytic interpretation — exemplified in Green’s account of a “good” analysis — in which an outcome is imposed after the fact as its true meaning. The word “so” is doing a lot conceptual work, insofar as it signals an openness to further connections and possible continuations. Psychoanalysis refuses this openness: it collapses the “so” into a single explanatory closure beneath the weight of Oedipus and castration.

They conclude this paragraph by saying:

The sigh of relief: you see, the colonel, the instructor, the teacher, the boss, all of this meant that: Oedipus and castration, “all history in a new version.” (AO, 67)

The “sigh of relief” names the relief of the psychoanalytic institution itself, which is able to subsume all desire under the familiar drama of the family. Every subject position — whether colonel, instructor, teacher, or boss — is reinterpreted as a disguised version of the familial scene. Psychoanalysis rewrites and papers over history: everything is history retold through the reductive lens of Oedipus.

Paragraph Twenty-Two

Deleuze and Guattari write:

We are not saying that Oedipus and castration do not amount to anything.

We are oedipalized, we are castrated; psychoanalysis didn’t invent these operations, to which it merely lends the new resources and methods of its genius. (AO, 67)

Deleuze and Guattari are not claiming that Oedipus is unreal or that castration never occurs. It would be too simple to argue that psychoanalysis invented these structures out of thin air. Oedipus and castration are real operations that organize desire, but they are sociohistorical processes rather than a priori truths. What psychoanalysis provides is not their origin, but a new framework through which these operations are universalized.

Further still:

But is this sufficient to silence the outcry of desiring-production:

We are all schizos!

We are all perverts!

We are all libidos that are too viscous and too fluid — and not by preference, but wherever we have been carried by the deterritorialized flows. (AO, 67)

Having acknowledged the existence of Oedipus and castration, Deleuze and Guattari ask whether this recognition is sufficient to “silence the outcry of desiring-production.” Of course it does not. Desire insists that “we are all schizos and perverts,” with libidinal flows that are at once too viscous and too fluid — not by choice, but as a consequence of how subjects are produced by deterritorialized flows.

They move to discuss the case of the neurotic:

What neurotic, provided he is somewhat serious, is not leaning against the rock of schizophrenia, a rock in this case mobile, aerolitic? (AO, 67)

Deleuze and Guattari employ Freud’s language. The “rock” against which the neurotic leans is not the rock of castration that psychoanalysis posits as the limit of analysis, but schizophrenia — understood not as a clinical pathology, but as the process of desiring-production. This rock is never fixed: it is mobile, in constant flux, and aerolitic — like a meteor, foreign and arriving from somewhere “out there.” Every neurotic is already brushing up against something that exceeds Oedipus, something that does not reside within the Oedipal structure but continually presses against and destabilizes it.

They move to ask a series of questions that will be analyzed in order:

Who does not haunt the perverse territorialities, beyond the kindergartens of Oedipus? (AO, 67)

Functionally, Deleuze and Guattari are asking who does not, at some point, organize desire outside the familial drama. Though Oedipus functions as a rudimentary framework — a “kindergarten” — in which desire is initially organized from infancy, who is not eventually drawn into non-Oedipal routines? And:

Who does not feel in the flows of his desire both the lava and the water? (AO, 67)

This rhetorical question points to the viscous and liquid tendencies of libido. The answer is obvious: no one escapes them. Desire is never ‘well behaved’ in terms of a submission to the kind of quantitative calibration that psychoanalysis seeks to impose. And finally:

And above all, what brings about our sickness?

Schizophrenia itself, as a process?

Or is it brought about by the frantic neuroticization to which we have been delivered, and for which psychoanalysis has invented new means — Oedipus and castration? (AO, 67–68)

Is it schizophrenia as a process of production what gives rise to illness? Or is illness instead produced by a “frantic neuroticization” of desire — by socially imposed norms that regulate it, with psychoanalysis serving as a central mechanism of this regulation? And:

Is it schizophrenia as a process that makes us sick, or is it the self-perpetuation of the process in the void — a horrible exasperation (the production of the schizophrenic-as-entity)? (AO, 68)

Might the problem lie in the “self-perpetuation of the process in the void,” where desire is forced to circulate endlessly within the three vertices of the Oedipal triangle, cut off from wider connections, and gives rise to the clinical entities that populate psychiatric institutions?

And:

Or is it the confusion of the process with a goal (the production of the pervert-artifice), or the premature interruption of the process (the production of the neurotic analysis)? (AO, 68)

The final question raises two possibilities: the process of desiring-production can either be mistaken for an end in itself, or it can be prematurely interrupted — both of which result in the production of clinical entities. When the process is confused with a goal, it is referred to as the “production of the pervert-artifice,” where desire constructs an artificial territoriality that is then treated as its ultimate aim — for instance, a rigid religious formation in which the territory of the church, doctrine, or ritual is mistaken for the purpose of desiring-production. By contrast, the premature interruption of the process gives rise to what they call the “production of the neurotic analysis”: the desiring-production process begins, but is cut off too early and forcibly recaptured within a fixed formation, resulting in repetition, conflict, guilt, etc.

Deleuze and Guattari write:

We are forcibly confronted with Oedipus and castration, we are reduced to them: either so as to measure us against that cross, or to establish that we cannot measure up to it. (AO, 68)

There is no choice: everyone is confronted with Oedipus and castration, whether they consent to it or not. One either submits to its terms or fails to do so. In either case, the structure is treated as a priori, and any difficulty is attributed to a fault or deficiency of the individual ego:

But in any case the harm has been done, the treatment has chosen the path of oedipalization, all cluttered with refuse, instead of the schizophrenization that must cure us of the cure. (AO, 68)

Amid the illness produced by Oedipus — an illness that psychoanalytic treatment produces — there is a proposed cure for the supposed ‘cure’ of psychoanalysis: schizophrenization.

— —

Citations:

• Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1972. University of Minnesota Press, 1983.
• Marx, Karl. Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. 1844.
• Freud, Sigmund. “A Child Is Being Beaten: A Contribution to the Study of the Origin of Sexual Perversions.” 1919.
• Nietzsche, Friedrich. 1883. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge University Press, 2006.
• Freud, Sigmund. “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” 1937.
• Lacan, Jacques. “Seminar V: Session of 16 April 1958.” Link.