Oedipus or No-thing?

Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus reveals through its distinction between schizoanalysis and psychoanalysis the way that society, the family, and the father fascistically indoctrinate humanity in order to control and repress human desire.

The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting as if things began with the child. (275)

“Things began with the child” is a subordinate clause placed into a subjunctive relation with the main clause—“The first error of psychoanalysis is in acting”—by the subordinating conjunction “as if.” As defined by the OED, “as if” “introduc[es] a supposition, or way of conceiving some entity or situation, that is not to be taken literally, but yields some insight or convenience in metaphysics.” So what “as if” introduces—“things began with the child”—is a supposition that isn’t meant to be taken literally. Yet, the simple past construction of this subordinate clause indicates that things did begin with the child. A construction more attuned to the unlikeliness of “as if” is the past perfect, “things [had begun] with the child.” The addition of “had” works with “as if” to definitively position the content of the clause within the realm of the unrealistic or impossible; instead, the simple past tense alongside the subjunctive “as if” creates a paradox of reality and non-reality at the level of rhetoric—the same move psychoanalysts-fathers make when they Oedipalize by insisting that something isn’t there when and where it actually is (desire), and by insisting something’s there when and where it actually isn’t or doesn’t have to be (Oedipus).

But here I have brought psychoanalysts into a sentence which does not include them on its surface. The prepositional phrase “of psychoanalysis” in the main clause attributes the “error . . . in acting” to psychoanalysis, the practice, not to psychoanalysts, the agents of this practice. Interesting move, considering it’s embedded in a passage concerning who to assign guilt to and how and when it is placed there. The next prepositional phrase “in acting” is an interesting choice because the preposition “in” casts “acting” as the object of the preposition and therefore locates the “error” within the act of acting, implying a subject who is doing the acting. As I read this sentence, I intuitively add the agents into the sentence, like so: The first error of psychoanalysis is in [psychoanalysts’] acting. The acting is theirs, a possession or object of the psychoanalyst, but the acting surfaces in this sentence while the actors and their ability to possess their actions are repressed by the rules placed upon syntax and grammar (by… another repression). Sound familiar?

“In acting” is an adverbial prepositional phrase; it both modifies the main (helping) verb “is” and acts as a prepositional phrase. It tells in what manner the “error . . . is” and it locates that error “in acting.” “The first” demands both that psychoanalysis has more errors (and the tone is that there are many more errors) and that this one is primary or foundational in that it comes before the others and deserves honorable mention. The first and foremost error of psychoanalysis, then, is in performance. Like children, psychoanalysis seems to have been dropped in medias res into the ongoing Oedipalization process, out of control of its own actions, repressing agency to act upon its own desires, involved in the doing of Oedipus instead of the being of desire. In this sentence, psychoanalysis plays the role of the child, submitting its desire to the will of the psychoanalysts-fathers, while the psychoanalysts, veiled, play the role of the paranoiac father who is Oedipalizing the child. The sentence, despite the larger paragraph’s and chapter’s insistence that the guilt begins with and is sustained by psychoanalysts-fathers, leaves us with only psychoanalysis “in acting” and the paradox of beginnings and endings extant in those “things began with the child.”

And what of these things? This word can refer to anything. It’s so general and vague that all I can say about it is that it’s a noun substitute, but for what noun, I don’t know. Could it be that the sentence implies that thing-ness, that all things, that the very capability for matter or circumstance to be construed as a “thing” begins not “with the child” but elsewhere? If so, the preceding sentences help us reposition thing-ness within the father where it is introjected into the child via a conversion from thing-ness to Oedipalized guilt. If this reading is valid, and the word “things” can be read as the very capacity to call things “things,” then can we also say that the sentence demands the transgenerational introjection of guilt in order for children to declare any kind of agency at all? Is it Oedipus or nothing?