Songs of Life: Psychedelic-Assisted Psychotherapy and Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘Desiring-Production’

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.

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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.