Songs of Life: Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Desiring-Production’
Deleuze and Guattari Studies – October 27, 2023
Source: OpenAlex
Summary
Psychedelic therapy, especially with psilocybin, often restricts the unconscious mind's vast potential by overemphasizing mystical experience as the singular therapeutic goal, a trend prevalent over the past fifteen years. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis, a new approach for psychotherapists emerges. Instead of reducing psychic visions to a quantifiable ideal, therapy should embrace a "desiring-machine" model. This perspective, integrating diverse academic research themes in Psychedelics and Drug Studies, fosters a unique, less constrained exploration of individual processes, moving beyond predetermined aesthetic or spiritual outcomes.
Abstract
This paper argues that practitioners of psychedelic-assisted therapy could learn a great deal from Deleuze and Guattari’s critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus, as well as the practice of materialist psychiatry – schizoanalysis – that they offer in its stead. Much of the clinical research on psychedelics (particularly psilocybin) over the past fifteen years has privileged mystical experience, assessed according to a quantifiable scale, as the goal of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy and source of cure ( Griffiths et al. 2006 , 2016 ; Barrett and Griffiths 2018 ; Pollan 2018 ). Has ‘mystical experience’ become the ‘imperialism of Oedipus’ within the psychedelic revival, towards which all psychedelic experience and activity of the unconscious is expected to tend? Distressed patients would be better held, I contend, through a therapeutic practice that adopts Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the unconscious as a desiring-machine and the cure as a completion of the process of desiring-production that is not arrested and reduced to pre-assigned ends. In this mode of working with psychedelics, the embodied memories, visions and sensations of the patient do not in a predetermined way ‘express’ or ‘represent’ a perennial, quantifiable experience (or myth). Rather, they enable the positive task of schizoanalysis of learning what a subject’s desiring-machines are and how they work, and the negative task of identifying and destroying all that stands in the way of their functioning.