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Still anti-oedipus? - Reflections on Deleuze and Guattari

ABSTRACT This article explores Deleuze and Guattari’s radical political philosophy’s applicability to contemporary psychotherapy in England. Drawing on my experience as a male psychotherapist working with survivors and victims of trauma, I initially critique psychotherapeutic approaches that disavow the social production of emotional distress. To do so, I draw on Deleuze and Guattari’s line of flight from the patriarchal Oedipal regulatory system that Freud identified. I then consider how Deleuze and Guattari are in danger of positing another absolute, a binary between productive desire and patriarchal power. Next, by drawing on Ettinger’s work concerning natality, I attempt to sketch a theory that can support male psychotherapists to hold a space without appropriating femininity. Ettinger considers the past-site accessible to male and female subjects and a future-site accessible to female subjects exclusively through differing relations concerning the natal. I suggest that this path can open up many possibilities when entering into social signifying networks, and is compatible with queer theory while maintaining feminine difference. Finally, I consider how the male psychotherapist can overcome his own phallic limits. This new perspective considers the therapeutic space as a socially produced site of support that accesses the subversive potential of mental health difficulties.