This is a rich and timely question, because schizoanalysis (Deleuze & Guattari) and Decolonial Psychotherapy already share a deep suspicion of psychoanalysis-as-usual and of colonial power embedded in discourse. Let me outline how they can be woven together:
1. Schizoanalysis in Brief
- Against Oedipus: Schizoanalysis rejects the reduction of subjectivity to the family triangle (father–mother–child). Instead, it asks how desire is produced socially and politically.
- Desiring-production: Desire is not lack, but production — it flows, connects, and creates assemblages.
- Anti-interpretation: Rather than interpreting symptoms back to hidden meanings, schizoanalysis maps the assemblages (machines, institutions, flows) that constitute subjectivity.
- Four tasks (from Anti-Oedipus):
- Articulate unconscious investments in social systems,
- Explore how desire is organized/repressed,
- Open new lines of flight (escape routes),
- Reconnect desire with its creative, revolutionary potential.
2. Decolonial Psychotherapy in Brief
- Critique of intrapsychic reduction: Individual suffering is inseparable from colonial history, racial capitalism, structural violence.
- Outsight (Smail): The gaze must turn outward to society, rather than only inward.
- Mutual co-regression: Therapist and patient co-experience colonial residues; neutrality is impossible.
- Ethical imperative: Therapy is political, aiming at decolonizing selfhood and community imagination.
3. Applying Schizoanalysis to Decolonial Psychotherapy
Here’s how schizoanalysis could operationalize decolonial work:
a. Mapping Colonial Assemblages
- Instead of seeing the patient’s distress as purely internalized oppression, schizoanalysis maps the colonial assemblages: law, education, media, religion, migration regimes, economic dispossession.
- The “symptom” is not an individual failure but a node in these assemblages.
b. Understanding Desire Beyond Lack
- Colonial discourse teaches subjects to desire the colonizer’s world while despising their own (what Fanon called “epidermalization of inferiority”).
- Schizoanalysis helps reveal how desire has been colonized — and how it can be re-routed into affirmative flows rather than stuck in lack.
c. Breaking the Oedipal Frame of Colonization
- Colonial power often re-enacts Oedipal logics (the colonizer as “Father,” the colonized as “child” in need of discipline or civilization).
- Schizoanalysis dismantles this, showing that desire and identity are not bound to paternalist scripts, but produced in wider assemblages — a key move in decolonial liberation.
d. Opening Lines of Flight
- Decolonial psychotherapy resonates with schizoanalysis in seeking lines of escape: new forms of identity, creativity, collectivity that resist colonial capture.
- The “line of flight” here is not escape into fantasy but concrete practices of survival, resistance, and solidarity (language revival, art, community rituals, political organizing).
e. Collective, Not Just Individual
- Both traditions resist privatizing distress. Schizoanalysis insists desire is social, while decolonial thought insists suffering is historical-structural.
- Together they make psychotherapy a collective cartography: not “my depression” but “our colonized desire under neoliberal global capital.”
4. In Practice (Imaginary Example)
A migrant client reports shame at their accent:
- Psychoanalysis (traditional): Might reduce it to unresolved parental conflicts.
- Decolonial psychotherapy: Frames it as internalized colonial language hierarchies.
- Schizoanalysis + decolonial: Maps the assemblage — media mocking accents, visa regimes privileging “proper English,” workplace discrimination, family expectations. Then it searches for lines of flight: affirming the accent as identity, forming community around hybrid speech, poeticizing the “broken” tongue.
5. In a Sentence
👉 Applying schizoanalysis to decolonial psychotherapy means turning therapy into a cartography of colonial assemblages, tracing how desire has been captured, and opening lines of flight toward new, decolonized possibilities of life and subjectivity.
Would you like me to draft a seminar handout titled 〈Schizoanalysis and Decolonial Psychotherapy: Mapping Colonial Assemblages, Opening Lines of Flight〉 — in the same concise style as the Klein one — so your S12 participants have two complementary “bridges” (Klein → decolonial, D&G → decolonial) side by side?
