“I got no /papamummy.”
„in the subject who desires, desire can be made to desire its own repression”
Reframing the Oedipal complex The "anti-" part of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model's articulation of society based on the family triangle - father, mother and child. Criticising psychoanalysis "familialism", they want to show that the oedipal model of the family is a kind of organisation that must colonize its members, repress their desires, and give them complexes if it is to function as an organising principle of society. Instead of conceiving the "family" as a sphere contained by a larger "social" sphere, and giving a logical preeminence to the family triangle, Deleuze and Guattari argue that the family should be opened onto the social, as in Bergson's conception of the Open, and that underneath the pseudo-opposition between family and social, lies the relationship between pre-individual desire and social production.
The child is a metaphysical being. As in the case of the Cartesian cogito, parents have nothing to do with these questions. And we are guilty of an error when we confuse the fact that this question is "related" to the parents, in the sense of being recounted or communicated to them, with the notion that it is "related" to them in the sense of a fundamental connection with them. By boxing the life of the child up within the Oedipus complex, by making familial relations the universal I ANTI-OEDIPUS mediation of childhood, we cannot help but fail to understand the production of the unconscious itself, and the collective mechanisms that have an immediate bearing on the unconscious: in particular, the entire interplay between primal psychic repression, the desiring-machines, and the body without organs.
For the unconscious is an orphan, and produces itself within the identity of nature and man.
The auto-production of the unconscious suddenly became evident when the subject of the Cartesian cogito realized that it had no parents, when the socialist thinker discovered the unity of man and nature within the process of production, and when the cycle discovers its independence from an indefinite parental regression.
Let us keep D.H. Lawrence's reaction to psychoanalysis in mind, and never forget it. In Lawrence's case, at least, his reservations with regard to psychoanalysis did not stem from terror at having discovered what real sexuality was. But he had the impression-the purely instinctive impression-that psychoanalysis was shutting sexuality up in a bizarre sort of box painted with bourgeois motifs, in a kind of rather repugnant artificial triangle, thereby stifling the whole of sexuality as production of desire so as to recast it along entirely different lines, making of it a "dirty little secret," the dirty little family secret, a private theater rather than the fantastic factory of Nature and Production.
To quote Artaud once again: "I got no/papamummy." We have seen how a confusion arose between the two meanings of "process": process as the metaphysical production of the demoniacal within nature, and process as social production of desiring-machines within history. Neither social relations nor metaphysical relations constitute an "afterward" or a "beyond." The role of such relations must be recognized in all psychopathological processes, and their importance will be all the greater when we are dealing with psychotic syndromes that would appear to be the most animal-like and the most desocialized. It is in the child's very first days of life, in the most elementary behavior patterns of the suckling babe, that these relations with partial objects, with the agents of production, with the factors of antiproduction are woven, in accordance with the laws of desiring- production as a whole. By failing from the beginning to see what the precise nature of this desiring-production is, and how, under what conditions, and in response to what pressures, the Oedipal triangulation plays a role in the recording of the process, we find ourselves trapped in the net of a diffuse, generalized oedipalism that radically distorts the life of the child and his later development, the neurotic and psychotic problems of the adult, and sexuality as a whole.
