"Primitive families constitute a praxis, a politics, a strategy of alliances and filiations; formally, they are 'the driving elements of social reproduction; they have nothing to do with an expressive microcosm; in these families, the father, mother, or sister. And in addition to the father, the mother, etc., there is the affine, who constitutes the active, concrete reality and makes the relations between families co-extensive with the social field. It would not even be exact to say that the family determinations burst apart at every corner of this field, and remain attached to strictly social determinations, since both kinds of determinations form one and the same component in the territorial machine. Since familial reproduction is not yet a simple means, or a material at the service of a social reproduction of another nature, there is no possibility of reducing (rabattre sur) social reproduction to familial nor is it possible to establish biunivocal relations between the two that would confer on any familial complex whatever an expressive value and an apparent autonomous form. On the contrary, it is evident that the individual in the family, however young, directly invests a social, historical, economic, and political field that is not reducible to any mental structure or affective constellation. That is why, when one considers pathological cases and processes of cure in primitive societies, it seems to us entirely insufficient to compare them with psychoanalytic procedure by relating them to criteria borrowed from the latter: for example, a familial complex, even if it differs from our own, or cultural material (des contenus culturels), even if it is brought into relation with an ethnic unconscious -- such can be seen in attempted parallelisms between the psychoanalytic cure and the shaman-istic cure (Devereux, Levi-Strauss). Our definition of schizo-analysis focused on two aspects: the destruction of the expressive pseudo-forms of the unconscious, and the discovery of desire's unconscious investments of the social field. It is from this point of view that we must consider many primitive cures; they are schizo-analysis in action." (p 170)[my bolds]
"They say that "there is no end to the existence of this Oedipus", when in fact it does not even have (apart from colonization) the necessary conditions to begin to exist. If it is true that thought can be evaluated in terms of the degree of oedipalization then yes, Whites think too much. The competence, the honesty, and the talent of these authors, psychoanalysts specializing in Africa, are beyond question. But the same applies to them as to certain psychotherapists here: it would seem that they don't know what they are doing. We have psychotherapists who sincerely believe they are engaged in progressive work when they apply new methods for triangulating the child -- but watch out, a structural Oedipus, and this time it isn't imaginary! The same is true of the psychoanalysts in Africa who apply the yoke of a structural or "problematical" Oedipus, in the service of their progressive intentions. There or here, it's the same thing: Oedipus is always colonization pursued by other means, it is the interior colony, and we shall see that even here at home, where we Europeans are concerned, it is our intimate colonial education. How are we to understand the phrases with which M.C. and E. Ortigues conclude their book? "Illness is considered as a sign of an election, of a special attention coming from supernatural powers, or as a sign of an aggression of a magical nature, an idea which is difficult to express in profane terms. Analytic psychotherapy can only intervene starting from the moment a demand can be formulated by the subject." (p 173)[my bolds]
Psychoanalysis and Ethnology Author(s): Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari Source: SubStance, Vol. 4, No. 11/12 (1975), pp. 170-197 Published by: University of Wisconsin Press
No comments:
Post a Comment