I think I was looking for something that had to do with how Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari differentiate neurosis and psychosis in their book ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’. I ended up landing on this article, ‘Living the intensive order: Common sense and schizophrenia in Deleuze and Guattari’, written by Julie Van der Wielen. Now, I don’t think I needed to read this article, but I did and it turned out to be really good reading.
Deleuze and Guattari address neurosis and psychosis a number of times In their book. They (27) acknowledge how Sigmund Freud differentiated between the two in his article ‘The Unconscious’. To make sense of that, we need to know what Freud means by id, ego and super-ego. He covers these in ‘New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis’.
To summarize Freud (103-106), id is this inaccessible primitive self, what people would call the ‘I’, whereas ego is id that has been modified by what else is there. To be more specific, this modification has the effect that it protects the id from simply seeking pleasure, because, according to him (106), it can often be bad for the person. Super-ego is then for him (92-93) the idealized version of the person, who that person would like to be.
It’s also worth noting that, for Freud (105), id is certainly unconscious, given that is inaccessible. It would tempting to say that ego and super-ego are therefore conscious, but that’s not entirely accurate as there are some parts of them that are, nonetheless, unconscious, as explained by him (99, 105).
Plus, it’s also worth noting that that Deleuze and Guattari use the terms neurosis / neurotic and psychosis / psychotic in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’. Freud refers to neurosis / neurotic also as hysteria / hysteric and to psychosis / psychotic as schizoprenia / schizophrenic in ‘The Unconscious’.
So, Deleuze and Guattari (27) point out, in reference to Freud (176), that there’s a major difference between the two:
“Freud says that hysterics or obsessives are people capable of making a global comparison between a sock and a vagina, a scar and castration, etc.”
This is indeed something that Freud (176) points out. Deleuze and Guattari (27) also add to this that this is how neurotics think, likening one to another, but only to add that they’d never go beyond this:
“it would never occur to a neurotic to grasp the skin erotically as a multiplicity of pores, little spots, little scars or black holes, or to grasp the sock erotically as a multiplicity of stitches.”
That is also what Freud indeed states. His (176) first example deals with skin.
“A tiny little cavity such as a pore of the skin would hardly be used by a hysteric as a symbol for the vagina, which he is otherwise ready to compare with every imaginable object that encloses a hollow space.”
His (176) second example deals with fabrics:
“In putting on his stockings, for instance, he was disturbed by the idea that he must pull apart the stitches in the knitting, i.e. the holes, and to him every hole was a symbol of the female genital aperture.”
So, in summary, Freud (176) reckons that the sock, in this case the stocking, represents a vagina and the leg represents a penis, so that putting the stocking on and then taking it off, again and again, represents masturbation, like jackin’ off to a sock. Deleuze and Guattari (27) comment on this:
“Comparing a sock to a vagina is OK, it’s done all the time, but you’d have to be insane to compare a pure aggregate of stitches to a field of vaginas: that’s what Freud says.”
Freud further specifies this distinction in ‘Fetishism’. He (137) states that anything that one fantasizes or fetishizes is simply “a substitute for the penis” or, to be more accurate, the phallus, which is more of the image of a penis than any specific penis. This imaginary penis is then what is supposed to be inserted to a vagina, which is the negated penis, what has been castrated, or so a child supposedly thinks, as explained by him (137-138)
More interestingly and more relevantly, he brings up the distinction between neurosis and psychosis in ‘Fetishism’. He (140) states that:
“I have arrived at the proposition that the essential difference between neurosis and psychosis was that in the former the ego …, in the service of reality, suppresses a piece of the id …, whereas in [the latter] it lets itself be induced by the id to detach itself from a piece of reality.”
This is also further specified by him (179) in ‘The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis’.
“Thus for a neurosis the decisive factor would be the predominance of the influence of reality, whereas for a psychosis it would be the predominance of the id.”
In other words, a neurotic person is thought of as still largely in touch with reality, whereas a psychotic person is thought of as having lost that touch with reality. Simply put, neurosis is not considered insanity, as such, whereas psychosis is considered insanity.
In ‘Fetishism’, he then backpedals on this issue to some extent, albeit, if you ask me, he doesn’t really clarify the distinction again, after modifying it. He just, sort of, leaves you hanging.
Deleuze and Guattari provide further commentary on this distinction. They (27) point out that Freud’s take in ‘The Unconscious’ sees neurosis as about representation and more specifically how a word represents a thing and how similar they are, like how a leg is a penis and then a sock is a vagina, and psychosis as about lack of representation, so that you’re only left with the words and how they are similar to one another. The problem here, for them (27-28), is that Freud cannot comprehend how a word can function without representing a thing, which is the case with proper names. What is so special about proper names? The short answer to that is that a name is just a name, among other names, but people who happen to have the same name are not defined by that name. The longer answer is that they are the ones who define those names, in the sense that they’ve been given a certain name, but it is through them, who they’ve become, that we understand that name, as they point out (37).
The point of addressing neurosis and psychosis has to do with how Deleuze and Guattari are unhappy with how Freud, and others, seek to reduce everything into neurosis and, more specifically, personal, individual neurosis. It’s always someone, who is neurotic because of someone, as they (30) point out. Plus, as they (37) add, it’s always something that is something else; “substitutes, regressions, and derivatives.” The issue they (38) take with psychosis is then that, for Freud, it’s reducible to when someone has just gone totally insane. They (38) elaborate this:
“We are criticizing psychoanalysis for … mak[ing] patients believe they would produce individual, personal statements, and would finally speak in their own name.”
The trick that they (13, 38, 199, 240) reckon Freud resorts to is to always substitute whatever it is with something else and, ultimately some issue pertaining to mommy and daddy. To put it bluntly, the person has not gone totally insane, it’s just Freud who thinks that person has gone totally insane, because isn’t willing to listen the person, as they (38) point out.
To connect this to Van der Wielen’s article, what I particularly like about it is the way she explains autism and catatonia in connection to schizophrenia and thus psychosis. Deleuze and Guattari mention autism and elaborate on catatonia in ‘A Thousand Plateaus’, but they deal with these two more in another book of theirs, ‘Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’.
To summarize Van der Wielen (1), the way Deleuze and Guattari define schizophrenia, and therefore also psychosis, is much more expansive and, in certain ways, much more positive manner than many mental health professionals. In their view, schizophrenia or psychosis is not a failure, as Freud would define it, not understanding the person, as noted by her (1). The person may certainly appear illogical, but it’s not that there’s no logic to the person, but rather that the logic is simply different, as she (1-2) points out.
I think Van der Wielen is also particularly helpful to many people who are unfamiliar with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s work. I really like the way she (2) explains how the schizophrenic, the psychotic or, well, just about anyone who thinks in an unfamiliar way, lives according to intensities, as opposed to extensities. Think of objects. They have a certain dimensions, those extensities, or so they appear to us anyway, but they also have intensities. They are not simply made of homogeneous substance that just magically happens to have and retain that form. This is not to say that they might be fairly homogeneous, having been made that way, but rather that they still need that something that binds all that substance together. Those are the intensities. We could, for example, heat them or part of them and see what happens. They might combust or melt. I think she puts it well when she states (2) that:
“Intensity … even gives rise to the perception of everything we can perceive: to the perception of objects, of what we call substance, of what we call qualities; and even to the perception of extension and its dimensions.”
This is what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as the intensive order in ‘Anti-Oedipus’, as she points (2). The thing is that most of us don’t think this way. There’s also a good reason for that, as she (2) goes on to clarify:
“[I]ntensity brings about these organizational principles and perceptions, but is at the same time cancelled out or covered over by them.”
So, when he have those things, whatever they may be, we just think that they are the way they are. We take it for granted and assumes that everyone knows this. We don’t really think of the intensities, like conductivity, heat and pressure. Furthermore, even when we acknowledge intensities, we are in the habit of thinking of them through extensities. So, for example, we think of ice and snow -> cold, instead of thinking cold -> ice and snow. There’s also a good reason for this, as she (3) also points out:
“[W]e only know intensity as already developed (and thus evened out) in extensity, since it is only sensible in this form.”
To be clear, it’s not that people are just daft and unable to understand intensities. It’s rather that they don’t think about them, because they appear to them through extensities. In other words, we are used to and, I’d say, conditioned to think think in terms of indivisible qualities and divisible quantities, such as depth, length and width, as also acknowledged by her (3).
This is also how most academic research is conducted or, rather, expected to be conducted and if you point out that you’re not really doing qualitative work, nor quantitative work, it just doesn’t compute for others. They may even think you’re insane, even though you’re not. It’s just that you don’t think the same way, nor necessarily agree with classifying something as qualitative or quantitative. I often feel tempted to point this out that it would be more useful to think in terms of intensities and extensities, as opposed to qualities and quantities.
To put that in simpler terms, I reckon that people who claim to be doing qualitative research are often, in fact, doing quantitative research. How so? Well, for the simple reason that they start with the extensities. To be fair, it is difficult not to start with them, as Van der Wielen (3) points out. Then there’s all this talk about how this interacts with that or the like. The problem here is that whatever we are thinking as interacting with something else, be it a thing that interacts with another thing or a human that interacts with another human, is always, already there. We don’t think in terms of intensities, by which I mean that we don’t stop to account for how it is that this and/or that thing, or person, appears to us. We focus on the appearance, what’s given, already there, and not on the apparition, how what’s given is given, so that there is that it that appears there and then.
I also like how Van der Wielen (3) summarizes the way in which Deleuze explains the problem with thinking in that kind of way in his book ‘Difference and Repetition’. There’s this notion of common sense to it and people even appeal to it, like, come on, it’s common sense and everyone knows that. We’ve been conditioned to think this way, thanks to philosophers like René Descartes and Immanuel Kant, as noted by her (3-4). I’d say that this goes all the way back to Plato, as Deleuze (134, 137-138) points out in his book and calls it “the model of recognition”, “the principle of representation” and the “world of representation” , but that’s not particularly important here.
What matters is that this common sense way of thinking that’s dominant, at least in the Western world, is thought of as not only ‘normal’, but also ‘natural’, as noted by Van der Wielen (4). There are all these things, these extensive and quantifiable things, already there, like for real, and they have the certain qualities to them and don’t you dare say otherwise. This is presented as what it is to think. If you say otherwise, you’re insane.
This connects neatly with how Van der Wielen (5) explains they way in those who think unlike us are thought to be insane and labeled as schizophenics or psychotics. What’s worth emphasizing is that such people are not delusional, nor out of touch with reality, as noted by her (5-6). They simply understand the world in a different way and, arguably, in a more fundamental way.
This is not to say that someone labeled as a schizophrenic or a psychotic person may not have issues, nor the person may not suffer as a consequence. The person may end up autistic or catatonic in a clinical sense, as Van der Wielen (6) points out. The former has to do with how the person appears absent, doing their own thing, but “separated from the real and cut off from life”, explained by Deleuze and Guattari (19-20) in ‘Anti-Oedipus’. The latter has to do with much of the same, as they (124, 329) point out that both are zero intensities, but, I’d say, it’s a more extreme withdrawal than the former. It is also worth noting that they (123) don’t see either as inherent to the person, but rather as effects, something that occurs in response when the person’s life is interrupted. They (130) also note that:
“Everything changes depending on whether we call psychosis the process itself, or on the contrary, an interruption of the process.”
Again, we could swap psychosis with schizophrenia here. The point remains the same. If we think of what those labels are used to designate in a productive way, we see that the person is on a journey, that life is a journey, or a process, if you will, as they (84) point out. If we think of that in a counter-productive way, at least for the person involved, we fail to recognize that journey or a process and do harm to that person who we interrupt, hence the question they (124) pose:
“They have lost reality But when did they lose it? During the journey, or during the interruption of the journey?”
Note how they do acknowledge that someone is lost, out of touch with reality, if you will, but, to be productive, they invite us to think why that might be the case and what could be done about it. Has the person simply gone insane because that’s who they are or who they are bound to be, unlike other people who haven’t gone insane and won’t go insane, or is that merely a response, like a defense mechanism, how they deal with being interrupted?
References:
- Deleuze, G. ([1968] 1994). Difference and Repetition (P. Patton, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1972] 1983). Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (R. Hurley, M. Seem and H. R. Lane, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Deleuze, G., and F. Guattari ([1980] 1987). A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (B. Massumi, Trans.). Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
- Freud, S. (1933). New Introductory Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. New York, NY: Carlton House.
- Freud, S. ([1927] 2024). Fetishism. In S. Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XXI (M. Solms, Ed., J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 133–142). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Freud, S. ([1924] 2024). The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis. In S. Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIX (M. Solms, Ed., J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 175–183). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Freud, S. ([1915] 2024). The Unconscious. In S. Freud, The Revised Standard Edition of The Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. XIV (M. Solms, Ed., J. Strachey, Trans.) (pp. 141–191). Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
- Van der Wielen, J. (2018). Living the intensive order: Common sense and schizophrenia in Deleuze and Guattari. Nursing Philosophy, 19 (4).