Félix Guattari: Thought, Friendship, and Visionary Cartography

From psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis

Psychoanalysis seems to be going through a profound crisis. In the

issue of Newsweekpublished for New Year 2000, there was a list of

things destined to disappear in the new century. The first would be

psychoanalysis, while, according to the news weekly, psychic or eso-

teric magic would survive, made popular by entire armies of charlatans.

For the better part of the twentieth century, psychoanalysis exer-

cised an intellectual and therapeutic predominance as a form of

interpretation and cure of neuroses. In the last few decades, we have

witnessed a flourishing of the relational type of psychotherapy (like the

one inspired by Gregory Bateson’s thought) and of body-related psycho-

therapies such as bioenergetics. Finally, we have now seen the return of

a refined and developed organicist therapy of psychopharmacology

while on the horizon we can already discern the possibility of the

decisive entry of genetics into the psychotherapeutic field.

The crisis of psychoanalysis does not correspond, in fact, to a quan-

titative diminution of psychopathologies, neuroses or mental suffering,

quite to the contrary. To the extent that statistics and quantitative

hypotheses can be taken seriously on issues concerning people’s

psychic well-being, common experience seems to suggest that mental

illness and psychic suffering are penetrating into the folds of city life

more pervasively or at least more evidently than ever.

Phenomena like depression and panic seem to have reached

epidemic dimensions in the Western world. According to some observers,

the crisis of psychoanalysis can be linked to a certain kind of hasty

consumerism. The demand for a cure is ever more related to a demand

for rapid consultations, and the spiritual consumer is ever less inclined

to commit to the very lengthy timeframe required by the psycho-

analytic cure. Prozac is better than anamnesis in the era of fast food

and the acceleration of productivity.

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But this is not enough. Perhaps it is necessary to recognize that psycho-

analysis is tied to an elitist status, not only because of its high costs

and the lengthy times of treatment, but most of all because it requires

an increasingly rare intellectual availability, today when mental time

has become the principal source of economic value. For the members

of the virtual class, who produce value by investing their cognitive

labour, mental suffering is a sort of professional illness that is being

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