Schizoanalysis: Seizing Desire as the First Act of Revolutionary Psychotherapy

Abstract

The question of psychotherapy and politics for scholars and activists (dare we say revolutionaries?) is set somewhere along its historical trajectory as bourgeois accommodation, reactionary social formation and its latent possibility as a social practice constitutive of revolutionary forms of subjectivity and consciousness. In this, the term “psychotherapy” has some of the same problematic historical 20th‐century resonance as words such as communism or democracy. However, it will be argued here that there may be some possibility to rethink psychotherapy as having new capacities within the shifting mode of production of global capitalism within what Marx termed the moment of “real subsumption”. To do so, a proposal for a radical political psychotherapy will be offered through a non‐dialectical immanentist reading of the psyche, drawing on Heraclitus and minor Marxism. This reading, it is suggested, opens the door to a re‐examination of Deleuze and Guattari's neglected proposals for schizoanalysis as revolutionary practice that may have much to offer as a response to the appropriations and brutality of global capitalism.