Kotsko, Adam. “Empire & Eschaton” Journal of Philosophy and Scripture Volume 2, Issue 1. Fall 2004
Lacanian psychoanalysis understands the human being as constitutively misshapen by the very process of entering the linguistic space of human interaction.
Rather than longing for the impossible pre-linguistic experience that Deleuze and Guattari glorify under the name of a “schizophrenia,” psychoanalysis seeks to reshape the subject’s relationship to the symbolic order, the social substance, to turn the constitutive division in the subject into an opportunity rather than a burden.
As Zizek says in his recent book on Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies:
“Is the Freudian Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpretive appropriation) not the exact opposite of the reduction of the multitude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and me matrix: the matrix of the explosive opening up of the subject onto the social space?
Undergoing “symbolic castration” is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network, propelled into a wider social network….” Organs 12