On the production of subjectivity

With his concept of the Unconscious Freud postulated the existence of a hidden continent of the psyche, where instinctual, affective and cognitive options in large part would be played out. Today we can't dissociate the theories of the Unconscious from the psychoanalitic, psychotherapeutic, institutional and literacy pratices which make reference to it. The Unconscious has become an institution, "collective equipment" understood in a broadcast sense. One finds oneself rigged out with an inconscious the moment one dreams, délires, forgets or makes a slip of the tongue... Freudian discoveries - which I prefer to call inventions - have undoubtedly enriche the ways we can approach the psyche. I am certainly not speaking pejoratively of invention! In the same way that romanticism invented a new love, a new nature and Bolshevism a new sense of class, the various Freudin sects have secreted new's ways of experiencing - or even of producing - hysteria, infantile neurosis, psychosis, family conflict, the reading of myths, etc. The Freudian Unconscious has itself evolved in the course of its history: it has lost the seething richness and disquieting atheism of its origins and, in its structuralist version, has been recentered on the analysis of the self, its adaptation to society, and its conformity with a signifying order.

Félix Guattari

1930 - 1992