Songs of Life: Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Desiring-Production’
Deleuze and Guattari Studies October 27, 2023 Patricia Kubala 6 citations
The paper argues that psychedelic-assisted therapy could benefit from Deleuze and Guattari's critique of psychoanalysis in Anti-Oedipus and their alternative practice of materialist psychiatry, schizoanalysis. Clinical research on psilocybin over the past fifteen years has privileged mystical experience, assessed by a quantifiable scale, as the goal of therapy and source of cure. The author questions whether 'mystical experience' has become the 'imperialism of Oedipus' within the psychedelic revival, toward which all psychedelic experience is expected to tend. Instead, the unconscious should be understood as a desiring-machine, and the cure as completing desiring-production without reducing it to pre-assigned ends. Patients' embodied memories and visions enable learning how their desiring-machines work and destroying obstacles to their functioning.