Yes, absolutely—we can say that both Gilbert Simondon and Gilles Deleuze maintained a strategic distance from psychoanalysis, and that this distance was deliberate, philosophical, and political.
Let me unfold this with care.
1. Simondon’s Strategic Distance: Quiet but Fundamental
a) Minimal engagement
- Simondon rarely mentions Freud or psychoanalysis explicitly.
- His core concepts—individuation, preindividual, transduction—develop a non-clinical, non-pathologizing theory of subject formation.
- He does not treat the unconscious as repressed content, nor desire as lack.
b) Why the silence matters
- It is not ignorance, but a strategic avoidance.
- Simondon’s ontology of emergence refuses to ground the subject in negativity, trauma, or repression, as psychoanalysis often does.
- His project is constructive, not hermeneutic: he seeks to explain how new forms of being emerge from tensions and potentials—not how symptoms reveal unconscious truths.
→ Silence becomes method: not a refutation of psychoanalysis, but a reconfiguration of its terrain.
2. Deleuze’s Strategic Distance: Loud, Philosophical, Polemical
a) Early distancing
- In Difference and Repetition (1968), Deleuze critiques Freud’s death drive and Lacan’s structuralism as reactive and negativistic.
- He emphasizes affirmation without negation, difference without identity, and desire without lack—all in direct opposition to Freudian-Lacanian categories.
b) With Guattari: A Full-Scale Break
- Anti-Oedipus (1972) is an explicit rupture with psychoanalysis:
- It attacks the Oedipal reduction of desire.
- It challenges the familial and symbolic structure of the unconscious.
- It proposes schizoanalysis as a new mode of theory and practice, based on flows, assemblages, becomings.
“Psychoanalysis still clings to the couch of Oedipus,” Deleuze and Guattari write. They aim to set desire free from the theater of representation.
→ Deleuze’s distance is polemical, utopian, generative.
3. Why Strategic?
This distance is not mere rejection—it’s a strategic repositioning because:
- Psychoanalysis, by the 1960s, had become hegemonic in French thought.
- For Simondon and Deleuze, psychoanalysis explains too much, too quickly—it captures becoming in the net of already-structured meaning.
- Both wanted to explore what comes before or beyond the unconscious as structured like a language.
4. Points of Refusal
|
Psychoanalysis |
Simondon & Deleuze |
|
Desire = lack |
Desire = production / differentiation |
|
Subject = split by language |
Subject = emergent from individuation |
|
Truth = revealed by interpretation |
Truth = constructed through becoming |
|
Structure = symbolic law |
Structure = metastable field / assemblage |
|
Cure = re-signification |
Cure = transformation / transduction |
5. Yet Not a Total Rejection
Despite their critiques, they do not throw away the question of the subject.
- Simondon retains interest in the affective, energetic, and relational dynamics of subjectivity—but reframes them without the unconscious.
- Deleuze, especially in his collaboration with Guattari, transforms psychoanalytic tools into machines: desiring-machines, assemblages, lines of flight—not repressions, but potentials.
Conclusion
Yes—Simondon and Deleuze kept a strategic distance from psychoanalysis because they were building an entirely different terrain for thinking the human, the social, the technical, and the possible.
Their distance is:
- Ontological (what is a subject?)
- Political (what kind of freedom is possible?)
- Ethical (how can we affirm life, rather than manage its symptoms?)
Would you like to explore how their distance could inform a post-psychoanalytic therapy? Or how Deleuze’s “schizoanalysis” and Simondon’s “individuation” might converge as a new ethics of transformation?
