Answer 1
Schizoanalysis, in practice, would look nothing like a therapy room with a couch and a clock. It would be a cartography workshop—a place for dismantling the fixed maps of identity, desire, and power, and drawing new ones on the fly.
Here is how I imagine it:
1. Not an Analysis of the Person, but of the Flows
- A schizoanalyst doesn’t ask, “Who are you?” but rather, “What flows through you? What machines are you plugged into?”
- Instead of focusing on the Oedipal story or the narrative ego, it maps the desiring-machines:
Which institutions, discourses, technologies, and unconscious forces are making you who you think you are?
In practice: The session could feel like drawing a diagram of connections and blockages rather than a dialogue about “feelings.”
2. Anti-Interpretation
- There is no “latent meaning” behind your symptoms. The schizoanalyst does not decode, but deterritorializes—helping you to see how your symptom is a function of larger social and machinic systems.
- Example: A panic attack is not only “your trauma,” but also capitalism’s demand for productivity colliding with your exhausted body, your digital rhythms, and your family’s inherited anxieties.
In practice: It might sound like, “Let’s trace where this panic connects—through your work emails, your father’s silence, your scrolling at 2 a.m., the algorithm that feeds you fear.”
3. Multiplicity Instead of Unity
- Instead of aiming for a “cohesive self” (as in classical analysis), schizoanalysis celebrates the fragments.
- “Which version of you wants to speak now? Which wants to dance? Which wants to sabotage the whole thing?”
- The aim is to free these multiplicities, not force them to agree.
4. Political and Cosmic
- Deleuze and Guattari insist that the unconscious is political. A session might involve looking at how power systems (state, economy, patriarchy) have colonized your desires.
- And it’s cosmic, too: you are a node in a larger assemblage—human, animal, machine, landscape, even climate.
5. The Session Itself as a Machine
- The room is not neutral. It’s a desiring-machine. The analyst is another machine.
- Instead of being a blank mirror (as in classical psychoanalysis), the schizoanalyst might co-create experiments:
Writing together, cutting and pasting images, mapping networks, or even walking outside—anything that unblocks flows of thought.
6. Practical Example
Imagine a patient says:
“I feel stuck in my job. I’m depressed.”
A schizoanalyst might ask:
- What machines are you stuck in? (Corporate bureaucracy? Family expectations? The career myth?)
- What lines of flight are emerging? (What small acts of sabotage or creation can open cracks?)
- What if we diagram your week as a map of forces? (Sleep patterns, economic constraints, suppressed impulses.)
The process is closer to “making a conceptual artwork” of your life than to solving a problem.
7. The Tone
Schizoanalysis is playful, anti-authoritarian, and creative. It wants to break the fascism inside you—the internal voice saying, “You must be coherent. You must be normal. You must obey.”
It’s less like Freud’s consulting room and more like a mix between a hacker lab, a poet’s table, and a guerrilla strategy meeting.
In a Sentence:
Schizoanalysis in practice is the art of unblocking life’s flows, mapping the power-machines that trap us, and inventing new paths—new ways to live, desire, and become—without ever pretending there is one “true” self to find.
Would you like me to sketch a “16 gestures of schizoanalysis”—like a counterpart to your 菊次郎十六式—where each gesture is a practical technique to unlock desire and deterritorialize identity?
Ah, schizoanalysis in practice—what a question! It’s as if you’re asking: What would it feel like to sit in a room (or a desert, or a train station) where Freud meets Deleuze & Guattari, but the couch has wheels, the analyst refuses to “interpret” your Oedipus, and the session itself is a moving machine?
Let me try to imagine it with you.
1. No Couch, Only Assemblages
- Instead of the traditional analytic couch, there might be a “field of connections”—conversations interlaced with drawings, maps, music, or fragments of your life as raw materials.
- The “patient” is no longer a neurotic subject needing to be cured, but a “desiring machine” whose flows have been blocked or territorialized by rigid social structures.
- The schizoanalyst asks:
“What flows here? What is blocked? Which connections want to form?”
2. Mapping Desires, Not Diagnosing Pathologies
- In Freud or Lacan, desire is often tied back to lack or castration (the Oedipal structure).
- In schizoanalysis, desire is productive, creative, immanent.
It’s not “you want because you lack,” but “you want because you are a factory of cosmic intensities.” - A session could involve drawing your desire flows as a map—like a cartography of intensities:
- What excites or terrifies you?
- Where do these forces connect to politics, family, culture?
- Where are you “plugged into” oppressive systems (capitalism, patriarchy), and how might you unplug or rewire yourself?
3. Multiplicity Instead of Unity
- Schizoanalysis is not trying to “integrate” you into a neat, cohesive self (as some therapies aim to do).
- Instead, it’s comfortable with your multiplicity—your voices, your contradictions, your fragments.
- If you say: “Part of me wants to vanish, and another part wants to dance in the street,”
the schizoanalyst might reply: “Good! Let’s see how these parts can co-exist, or even collaborate.” - It’s not about healing into normality, but about creating new possibilities for being.
4. The Political Unconscious
- Schizoanalysis is deeply political: your anxiety or depression isn’t just personal—it’s connected to the “machinic” systems you live in.
- Feeling exhausted? Maybe capitalism has over-coded your body.
- Feeling “guilty”? Maybe Oedipus isn’t yours but was installed by family and society.
- A schizoanalyst might help you trace the social investments in your personal suffering:
“Where does the system speak through you? And how can we speak otherwise?”
5. Playfulness & Lines of Flight
- Schizoanalysis would probably invite play—not as regression, but as experiment:
- Try new ways of speaking about your life (narratives that don’t start with trauma or lack).
- Identify “lines of flight”—ways to escape old grids of meaning.
- A session might feel less like interpretation and more like co-composing a song, a map, or a plan for sabotage.
Where psychoanalysis asks: “Where did this symptom come from?”
Schizoanalysis asks: “What can this symptom do? What new territory could it open?”
6. How It Might Feel
Imagine a session where:
- Instead of feeling dissected, you feel plugged into a larger creative force.
- The analyst isn’t the all-knowing Other, but a co-cartographer, exploring the desert of your desires with you.
- Silence isn’t awkward but pregnant with potential connections—to art, to history, to dreams of other worlds.
In one sentence:
Schizoanalysis is therapy as wild cartography, as creative sabotage of fixed identities, as a celebration of desire’s multiplicity—where the goal is not to “heal” the self but to free the flows that make life worth living.
Would you like me to sketch a fictional “schizoanalytic session”—a short dialogue between a schizoanalyst and a patient? It might give a vivid sense of its tone and practice, like a playful dérive on the analyst’s couch.
