Schizoanalysis

1. Introduction

Version followed: Guattari's clinical schizoanalysis as practised at La Borde clinic and set out in Psychanalyse et transversalité (1972; texts 1955–71), L'inconscient machinique (1979), Cartographies schizoanalytiques (1989) and Chaosmose (1992), with Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Œdipe (1972) used as theory only. Institutional practices Guattari shared with Jean Oury and François Tosquelles (institutional psychotherapy) are included where Guattari describes or adopts them.

Read this first. Schizoanalysis is not a manualised therapy. It has no protocol, no fixed session structure, no fidelity measure and no training curriculum. Guattari said explicitly that analytic cartographies should develop without prior recourse to settled theoretical principles, and that psychiatric practice must be continually reinvented [source: Guattari, The Three Ecologies, pp. 38–39]. What follows is (a) the clinical and institutional practices Guattari and his co-workers actually describe, and (b) clearly marked [synthesis] showing how a therapist working outside a clinic like La Borde, for example in private or community practice, can turn them into session practice.

What it is. Schizoanalysis is a way of analysing how subjectivity is produced. It looks at the material, social, technical, aesthetic and institutional components that combine to make a person's way of existing. It does not interpret a hidden family drama. Deleuze summed up the premise: the unconscious "is not a theater, but a factory" [source: Deleuze, interview in Chaosophy, p. 53].

How change happens. Change comes from building new assemblages: new links between a person and activities, groups, materials, rhythms and values. These can catalyse a shift in an existential territory that has frozen into repetition. Guattari called the target a "catalytic nucleus". Analysis becomes the invention of such nuclei, so that an existence can branch in a new direction. It stops being the transferential interpretation of symptoms [source: Guattari, Chaosmosis, p. 18]. In institutions, change also depends on transforming the group and institutional field in which the person lives. This means raising transversality so that groups can speak and act as subject-groups [source: Guattari, "Transversality" (1964), in Molecular Revolution, pp. 11–24; Psychoanalysis and Transversality, pp. 102–121, via Stivale and New Materialism Almanac].

2. Framework

No canonical phases exist. Guattari, Deleuze and La Borde did not specify stages, session counts or criteria for moving between phases [source: all primary texts consulted; none specify phases]. The three "tasks" of schizoanalysis in Anti-Œdipe are logical tasks, not a time sequence. D&G call them inseparable [source: Anti-Oedipus ch. 4, via Wikipedia "Schizoanalysis" citing Sellar; page refs approx. pp. 311–382 [uncertain: chapter]]:

Negative task: dismantle Oedipal, familialist and egoic interpretive frames (the "representational territorialities" of desire).
First positive task: find the person's desiring-machines. This means how their desire actually connects, flows and breaks, independently of interpretation.
Second positive task: reach the unconscious libidinal investments of the social field, as distinct from preconscious investments of interest. Also locate them between a paranoiac/reactionary pole and a schizoid/revolutionary pole.

Pragmatic sequence from A Thousand Plateaus. D&G list four components of "pragmatics or schizoanalysis" as four tasks: a tracing of the mixed semiotics already operating; a transformational map of how those regimes could be translated or changed; a diagram of the abstract machines in play; and a program of the assemblages that distribute everything [source: D&G, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 146]. L'inconscient machinique names the same four as generative, transformational, diagrammatic and machinic components [source: Wikipedia "Schizoanalysis" citing The Machinic Unconscious [uncertain]].

Working arc for individual or group practice [synthesis]. This is my organising scheme, not Guattari's. Phases overlap and recur.

Phase [synthesis]	Goal	Format and typical length	Move on when
A. Setting analysis	Analyse the frame itself: who refers, what institutions surround the client, what the therapist's position and the dual setting impose. Arrange co-management.	First 1–3 contacts; revisited whenever stuck	Client and therapist share a working picture of who and what is involved, and some choices about format are the client's
B. Cartography (tracing)	Map the existential territories, refrains, flows, machinic phyla and universes of value that compose the client's current existence (the four functors)	Sessions 2–6 typically; individual, family or group	A shared, revisable map exists and at least one rigid refrain or blocked assemblage is identified
C. Catalysis (map and program)	Find and support possible catalytic nuclei: new activities, groups, materials, encounters. Experiment.	Open-ended; weekly or more flexible; may involve activities outside the room	Some new connection holds across weeks and the client reports or shows more room to move
D. Consolidation and autonomy	Help new territories gain consistency without hardening into fresh rigid refrains; extend the client's own group and collective supports	Tapering, irregular or ending; client-led	Client can map and modify their own assemblages, and supports exist outside therapy

Format. At La Borde work ran across many settings at once: individual sessions, daily meetings, workshops, clubs, the rota grid, and informal contact in shared tasks [source: Chaosmosis pp. 6–7; PortoArte article on the grille citing Guattari 1998]. Guattari also worked with family therapists (Mony Elkaim's group), using improvised scenes and video [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 7–8]. Outside an institution, combine individual sessions with deliberate links to groups and activities [synthesis]. There is no session count in any source.

3. Guiding principles

Sources for this section: Chaosophy pp. 53, 67; Chaosmosis pp. 6–18, 59–61; Three Ecologies pp. 35–46; "Transversality" (via Stivale; Radical Philosophy "Guattari and transversality"); Anti-Oedipus via Wikipedia and Hardt's notes; PortoArte (Oury).

The unconscious is productive, not representational. Ask what a symptom or fantasy does and connects to, not what it means. D&G say the unconscious raises "solely problems of use" [source: Anti-Oedipus p. 109, via Hardt notes].
Desire invests the social field directly. Look at work, money, media, institutions, politics and technology as sites of desire, not only at family.
Anti-familialism. Do not reduce material to mummy-daddy-me. Family is one component among many.
Psychosis as a model, not neurosis. Treat psychotic experience as revealing how subjectivity is assembled, and work with it rather than only containing it [source: Dosse, intro to Chaosophy, p. 27]. Practical meaning: begin from the most disorganised material, with no pre-set norm of the ego.
Don't romanticise madness [synthesis, drawing on AO's distinction between schizophrenic process and the clinical schizophrenic]. Suffering is real. La Borde "unashamedly practiced psychiatry" [source: Dosse, Chaosophy, p. 19] and accepted neuroleptics and, at times, ECT [source: Wikipedia "Institutional psychotherapy"]. Practical meaning: keep medical and risk care in place.
Treat the institution as well as the person (pathoplasty). Oury held that institutions are themselves sick and shape pathology. He is quoted as saying that treating patients without treating the hospital is madness [source: PortoArte article, translated]. Practical meaning: analyse your own setting, rules and service before blaming the client.
Transversality. Increase communication across hierarchical levels and closed compartments. Guattari's image is horses' adjustable blinkers [source: "Transversality", MR p. 18 via Stivale]. Practical meaning: open channels between roles, disciplines and groups.
Subject-groups over subjugated groups. Help groups, including the client's own, to speak for themselves and take on their own finitude, rather than receive their law from outside [source: "Transversality"; PT p. 234 via Radical Philosophy]. Practical meaning: favour arrangements where clients decide.
A citizen first. The patient is "a citizen first, and individual afterwards" [source: PT p. 145, via Stivale]. Practical meaning: rights, work and social belonging are therapeutic matters.
Distributed, not dual, transference. Transference is spread across many people, places and objects (Oury's "transferential constellation"; Tosquelles' dissociated transference) [source: Wikipedia "Institutional psychotherapy"; Radical Philosophy citing Oury]. Practical meaning: value the client's attachments to others and things, not only to you.
Co-management. Move toward co-management of the production of subjectivity, and distrust suggestion and authority [source: Chaosmosis, p. 11]. Practical meaning: decide goals and means with the client.
No rigid neutrality. "A rigid neutrality or non-intervention would be negative" [source: Chaosmosis, p. 18]. Practical meaning: take a position when an opening appears, and accept you may be wrong.
Ethico-aesthetic paradigm. Work "more like" an artist than a professional psychiatrist with a scientistic model [source: Three Ecologies, p. 35]. Practical meaning: improvise, compose and craft situations.
Continuous reinvention. Practice must be restarted from scratch, or it becomes a cycle of deathly repetition [source: Three Ecologies, pp. 38–39]. Practical meaning: review and change your own routines.
Metamodelling. Schizoanalysis does not choose one model over others. It maps how any model, whether psychoanalytic, religious, scientific or the client's own, organises self-reference, and aims at complexification [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 22, 59–61]. Practical meaning: use the client's own explanatory systems as material, and don't impose yours.
Process and singularisation. The aim is to "resingularize serialized ensembles" [source: Three Ecologies, p. 46]. Practical meaning: support what is singular to this person, not normalisation to an average.
Heterogenesis. Bring heterogeneous components together: arts, material work, technology, groups [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 6–7]. Practical meaning: offer encounters outside the client's usual codes.
Interpretation can come from anyone. An interpretation can be given by "the idiot of the ward" if heard at the right time [source: "Transversality", via Radical Philosophy]. Practical meaning: listen to remarks from patients, family and staff as potentially analytic.
Functional, mechanic stance. "The schizoanalyst is a mechanic". The analysis is solely functional [source: AO, via Wikipedia "Schizoanalysis"]. Practical meaning: look for what works, jams or could be reconnected.

4. Intervention inventory

This inventory has two kinds of entry. Entries 4.1–4.9 are institutional and group practices that Guattari and La Borde actually used. Entries 4.10–4.21 are analytic and individual practices: some described by Guattari, some theory-derived and marked [synthesis] where I turn them into session steps. Step-by-step sequences are almost always [synthesis], because Guattari described practices discursively and never in procedural form. All example language is my own wording, labelled (illustrative), unless it is a short cited quote.

4.1 Institutional analysis: treat the setting (pathoplasty)

Purpose and when to use: At the start and whenever work stalls. Examine how the service, its rules, hierarchy and routines produce or worsen the client's difficulties. Originated with Tosquelles and Oury. Guattari later renamed the whole approach "institutional analysis" [source: Wikipedia "Institutional psychotherapy"; PortoArte citing Oury].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) List every institution touching the client: your service, referrer, benefits, school or work, housing, family, online platforms. (2) For each one, note what it requires of the client, who speaks for the client there, and what the client cannot say there. (3) Examine your own setting: fees, timing, waiting-room rules, record-keeping, and who sees notes. Ask which of these rigidify the client. (4) Change one feature of your own frame that you can change, and observe the effect. (5) Bring recurrent institutional blockages to team meetings or supervision, not only to the client.
Example language (illustrative): "Before we look at you, I'd like to look at the arrangements around you, including this one. What about coming here makes things harder?"
Watch for: Locating every problem inside the client. It is working when practical frame changes produce shifts in mood or engagement, and when staff discussions start naming institutional factors.

4.2 Raising the coefficient of transversality

Purpose and when to use: The aim is to increase the degree to which people at different levels and in different compartments of an institution see and communicate with each other. Use it where hierarchy (verticality) or closed peer groups (horizontality) block communication. Guattari's image is horses in a field whose blinkers are adjusted, mostly by those at the top [source: "Transversality" (1964), MR p. 18, via Stivale; New Materialism Almanac].
Steps [synthesis from Guattari's account]: (1) Map who talks to whom and who decides what. Note who is never in the room (night staff, cleaners, patients, families). (2) Create mixed forums: joint meetings of patients, nurses, doctors, administrative and domestic staff. (3) Have those with formal authority deliberately loosen their "blinkers": share information, admit uncertainty, take on non-medical tasks. (4) Track whether people from lower levels can now initiate change, not only receive it.
Example language (illustrative): To a team: "Who here knows something important about this patient that never reaches the clinical meeting?"
Watch for: Cosmetic horizontality, where everyone meets but the same people decide. It is working when proposals start coming from patients or junior staff and are acted on.

4.3 Fostering subject-groups and analysing group phantasy

Purpose and when to use: Use it for any group: a ward, team, therapy group, family or the client's own collective. The aim is to move a subjugated group, which is "spoken by others" and receives its law from outside, toward a subject-group that can speak, interpret its own situation and take on its finitude [source: "Transversality"; PT p. 234 via Radical Philosophy; MR p. 14 via Stivale].
Steps [synthesis from Guattari's account]: (1) Note the manifest content: observable conduct, leaders, scapegoats. (2) Listen for latent group desire in "ruptures of meaning", the places where the group's speech breaks down, jokes or goes oddly silent [source: MR p. 15 via Stivale]. (3) Name rigid fixed-role arrangements, for example everyone deferring to the doctor. Guattari called these sources of "spell-binding and reactionary group phantasies" [source: PT p. 111 via Radical Philosophy]. (4) Hand decisions about the group's own functioning back to the group. (5) Let the group discuss its own ending, limits and mistakes.
Example language (illustrative): "We keep waiting for someone to tell us what this group is for. What if we decide?"
Watch for: A group that becomes a subject-group in name but still waits for the leader's verdict. It is working when the group interprets itself and changes its own rules.

4.4 Distributing the doctor's function and the transference (transferential constellation)

Purpose and when to use: Use with psychotic and severely withdrawn clients for whom a single dual transference is impossible or dangerous. Spread the therapeutic function across many people and settings. Guattari argued for being done with the doctor who "speaks for" the institution, and for splitting that function into multiple responsibilities [source: PT p. 111 via Radical Philosophy]. Oury's "transferential constellation" and Tosquelles' "dissociated transference" refer to the small, scattered transferences a psychotic person makes to many people and things [source: Wikipedia "Institutional psychotherapy"; Oury interview via Radical Philosophy].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Identify everyone the client actually connects with, including the cook, the bus driver and a particular object or place. (2) In team meetings, gather what each of these people observes. Oury and Tosquelles used regular "constellation" meetings for this [uncertain: the format is described in secondary literature]. (3) Protect and enrich those links rather than channelling everything to the named therapist. (4) Make decisions with input from the constellation.
Example language (illustrative): To staff: "She hardly speaks to me, but she waits for you at the kitchen door every morning. What happens there?"
Watch for: Fragmented care without coordination. It is working when the client's links multiply and any one person's absence no longer causes collapse.

4.5 The grid (la grille): rotating tasks

Purpose and when to use: This is La Borde's rota system. Guattari called it an instrument for regulating necessary institutional disordering [source: Guattari 1998, Chimères 34, via Radical Philosophy and PortoArte]. It breaks the freezing of roles and organises collective life, and it produces a collective analytic discursivity about what people like and avoid.
How it worked [source: PortoArte article, citing Guattari 1998]: It arose around 1957. Names ran down one axis and the hours from 8 a.m. to 9 p.m. across the other. It covered tasks (dishwashing, cleaning, kitchen, night shifts, table service) and activities. Disagreeable tasks were shared by everyone. Tasks carried points for value and frequency, which people negotiated in a daily grid meeting. A rotating team of grilleuses ran it, and doctors were excluded from running it. No one was to be assigned a task out of the blue without consent. Medicines were not always handed out by the same person. Staff without medical training took on clinical tasks, and doctors and nurses washed dishes [source: Cruz, Poetry Foundation].
Steps for adaptation [synthesis]: In a day service, residential unit or team: (1) list recurring tasks; (2) agree a rotation open to all roles; (3) hold a short daily or weekly negotiation; (4) treat the conflicts that arise as analytic material, not just as an administrative nuisance. In individual therapy, use the client's own weekly round as a "personal grid": map who does what and when, and experiment with rotating or swapping a task (see 4.13).
Example language (illustrative): "Everyone wants the laundry and nobody wants the night shift. What does that tell us about this place?"
Watch for: Patients being used as unpaid labour, and confidentiality or safety breaches when non-clinical staff do clinical tasks. Check local law and professional rules [synthesis]. It is working when roles loosen and people take initiative outside their assigned function.

4.6 Clubs, workshops, meetings and the newspaper

Purpose and when to use: To create "local centres for collective subjectivation" in which psychotic patients live in a climate of activity and take on responsibilities [source: Chaosmosis, p. 6; Three Ecologies, chronology p. ix]. La Borde's activities included clubs, the newspaper and the laundry, alongside workshops and meetings [source: PortoArte; Guattari, De Leros à La Borde, p. 66, via Radical Philosophy]. The therapeutic club itself came from Tosquelles at Saint-Alban [source: Wikipedia "Institutional psychotherapy"].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Set up patient-run activities with real budgets and real decisions. (2) Rotate offices such as secretary, treasurer and editor. (3) Hold regular meetings where activities are planned and disputes worked through. (4) Treat what happens in these settings as clinical material and discuss it in staff meetings.
Example language (illustrative): "The club has money for one outing this month. You decide where, and you organise it."
Watch for: Activities that staff in practice run for patients. It is working when patients hold real responsibilities and the activity survives without staff driving it.

4.7 Heterogeneous activity assignment (crossing codes)

Purpose and when to use: Put people into activities outside their usual sociocultural code to recompose their "existential corporeality". Guattari describes patients from poor farming backgrounds being invited into plastic arts, drama, video and music, and bureaucrats and intellectuals being drawn to kitchen, garden, pottery and the riding club [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 6–7].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Note the client's dominant codes, such as intellectual, manual, caring or technical. (2) Offer an invitation, not an instruction, to try a component from a different register. (3) Make it concrete and repeated: a class, a plot, a rehearsal. (4) Review what changed in body, rhythm and relationships, not only in insight.
Example language (illustrative): "You've thought about this a lot. Would you be willing to do something with your hands for a few weeks and see what it does?"
Watch for: Prescribing hobbies mechanically. It is working when the client describes new sensations, rhythms or contacts.

4.8 Hearing the analyser: interpretation from anywhere

Purpose and when to use: An interpretation is not the analyst's monopoly. A patient's remark can interpret the institution. Guattari tells of a patient's sudden cry in a scene with staff playing cards. He read it as a cry that interpreted the card players' alienation, "a transfer of the analytical function" [source: Guattari in Chaosophy, p. 67]. He held that the most withdrawn patient may suddenly reveal details about those around him [source: Chaosophy, p. 68], and that "the idiot of the ward" can give an interpretation if heard at the right time [source: "Transversality", via Radical Philosophy].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Treat odd remarks, outbursts and jokes about the setting as possible interpretations of it. (2) Write them down and bring them to the relevant group. (3) Ask what they reveal about staff, rules or group phantasy, not only about the speaker's pathology.
Example language (illustrative): "What he shouted yesterday made us all uncomfortable. Was he telling us something about how we run this place?"
Watch for: Dismissing such remarks as symptoms. It is working when staff change practice in response to patients' remarks.

4.9 Psychodramatic and video training scenes (with family therapists)

Purpose and when to use: Mainly for training and supervising therapists, and for family work. Guattari describes Mony Elkaim's group improvising psychodramatic scenes in training, with video feedback and observers. Therapists "take risks" and put their own phantasies into play in a ludic face-to-face encounter, instead of keeping an averted gaze [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 7–8].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) In a training or supervision group, re-enact a stuck session or family scene with colleagues taking roles. (2) Record it, with consent. (3) Review it while attending to non-verbal and semiotic cues: rhythm, posture, gaze, the frame. (4) Have therapists name their own phantasies as they show in the scene.
Example language (illustrative): "Play the father as you felt him, not as you think he is. Then we'll watch what your body did."
Watch for: Shame and exposure. Agree confidentiality and keep video secure. It is working when therapists notice their own part in the stuck pattern.

4.10 Seizing the catalytic nucleus (active, non-neutral intervention)

Purpose and when to use: Use when a client is stuck and mentions, often in passing, a small project or interest. Guattari's example is a patient who has been going round in circles and mentions wanting driving lessons or to learn word processing. He treats this as a possible key that can activate a complex refrain and open new fields of possibility, and advises answering, "yes, perhaps this experience is important" [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 17–18; Three Ecologies, translators' intro]. He warns that rigid neutrality here "would be negative" [source: Chaosmosis, p. 18].
Steps [synthesis from Guattari's example]: (1) Listen for minor, concrete, forward-pointing details: a course, an object, a trip, a person. (2) Mark them out loud. Don't interpret them back into the old problem. (3) Ask about practicalities. (4) Support the first concrete step. (5) In later sessions, follow what the new activity connects to: people, rhythms, a sense of self.
Example language: "Yes, perhaps this experience is important" [source: Chaosmosis, p. 18]. Then (illustrative): "Tell me more. When could you book the first lesson?"
Watch for: Pushing your own preferences, or treating every whim as a catalyst. It is working when the activity starts to reorganise time, relationships or self-description. Guattari says you take the risk of being wrong [source: Chaosmosis, p. 18], so drop it if it goes nowhere.

4.11 Mapping existential refrains

Purpose and when to use: The refrain is a repeated rhythm, ritual, phrase, image or habit that holds an existential territory together. Guattari's own example is the fascination that keeps him in front of the TV screen. Obsessive rituals are hardened refrains, and psychosis can occur when a person's refrain is threatened. The symptom "functions like an existential refrain" [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 15–17, 26]. Refrains can also be "catalytic focal points of subjectification" [source: Three Ecologies, p. 46]. Use this with compulsions, rituals, addictive patterns, withdrawn states and stereotyped speech.
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Collect the client's refrains: daily rituals, phrases, songs, screens, routes, smells, objects. (2) For each refrain, ask what territory it holds together and what it protects against. (3) Distinguish refrains that are open, varying and connecting from those that are closed, rigid and isolating. (4) Never strip a protective refrain away abruptly. Instead introduce small variations, or add a new refrain alongside (see 4.10, 4.7). (5) Review at intervals.
Example language (illustrative): "When you check the locks, what world does that put back in place for you?" "Is there a song, a walk or a time of day that makes you feel like yourself?"
Watch for: Anxiety surges or decompensation if a refrain is removed too fast. This is especially important in psychosis [synthesis, from Guattari's remark on threatened refrains]. It is working when the refrain becomes more flexible, or when new refrains appear.

4.12 Four-functor cartography (metamodelling with the client)

Purpose and when to use: Map a person's existence along Guattari's four functors: material and semiotic Flows (F), such as money, signs, actions and libido; machinic Phyla (Φ), such as codes, technologies, knowledge and systems that evolve; existential Territories (T), meaning lived grounds, body, home, self and the transference; and incorporeal Universes of value and reference (U), such as music, ideals and complexes [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 59–61; Wikipedia "Schizoanalysis"]. Guattari developed the four dimensions in a 1980–81 seminar with therapists as entry points for practice. The aim was not to uncover hidden contents but to conduct a conversation about how the person represents and imagines their own existence [source: Holmes on Schizoanalytic Cartographies, citing Guattari's seminars [uncertain: seminar texts]]. The functors are metamodelling tools, not diagnostic categories [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 59–61].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) On paper or a whiteboard, make four zones with the client. (2) F: what currently flows in and out: money, time, work, substances, messages, sex, care. (3) Φ: what systems and machines they plug into: phone, apps, job systems, diagnostic labels, religion, law. (4) T: where and in what body they feel at home or not: rooms, routes, routines, people, refrains. (5) U: what values, aesthetic worlds or ideals move them: music, faith, politics, a sport, a lost ideal. (6) Look for blockages and for "transitional components" where change in one zone could spread to the others [source: Holmes]. (7) Choose one point of entry and plan an experiment (see 4.13).
Example language (illustrative): "Let's draw your life as four things: what flows through it, what systems you're plugged into, where you feel at home, and what you care about beyond yourself."
Watch for: Turning the map into jargon or a fixed diagnosis. Use the client's words, not F/Φ/T/U. It is working when the client can use the map to see links themselves.

4.13 Pragmatic mapping: tracing, transformational map, diagram, program

Purpose and when to use: Use after cartography to plan change. D&G's four schizoanalytic tasks are: make a tracing of the existing mixed semiotics; make a transformational map of how those regimes could be translated and of where new ones could bud; make a diagram of the abstract machines in play; and outline a program of assemblages, including their alternatives, jumps and mutations [source: A Thousand Plateaus, p. 146]. Faciality and "black holes" can be included in the tracing [source: Callen review of The Machinic Unconscious, pp. 75–78 [uncertain]].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Tracing: describe how the client's situation currently runs. Which ways of speaking, bodily reactions, institutional codes and faces (who judges, whose gaze) govern it? (2) Map: where could these shift? Where is there already variation or exception? (3) Diagram: what is the abstract pattern running across different areas, for example "whenever I'm evaluated, I vanish"? (4) Program: design concrete, small, revisable experiments in assemblage: new settings, people, schedules, materials. Agree how you'll review them.
Example language (illustrative): "Where in your week does this pattern not happen? What's different about that place?" "Let's design one small experiment for the next two weeks."
Watch for: A map that is only a tracing, reproducing the status quo. D&G insist the map is not the tracing [synthesis, drawing on ATP's distinction]. It is working when the experiments reveal openings the tracing did not show.

4.14 The negative task: dismantling familialist and egoic frames

Purpose and when to use: Use when the client, or prior therapy, has locked their material into an Oedipal or family-only story, guilt, or an ego-ideal of normality. The negative task of schizoanalysis is to destroy Oedipus, the illusion of the ego, the superego, guilt and castration as interpretive frames [source: Anti-Oedipus ch. 4 [uncertain: chapter; paraphrase consistent with Wikipedia/Sellar]].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Notice when explanations always loop back to mother, father or childhood. (2) Don't refute them. Widen the field: what else was happening, such as class, school, money, migration, technology, illness, institutions? (3) Question guilt-based self-accounts by asking what they do now. (4) Hold the family as one component among many.
Example language (illustrative): "Your father matters here. What else was going on around you then: money, the neighbourhood, school, what was on TV?"
Watch for: Dismissing real family harm or abuse. Dismantling a frame is not denying events [synthesis]. It is working when the client's account becomes more populated and less guilty.

4.15 First positive task: finding the desiring-machines (use, not meaning)

Purpose and when to use: Find how the client's desire actually connects, flows and breaks: which objects, people, activities and part-objects it couples with, and with what result. Don't ask what these mean [source: AO, via Wikipedia "Schizoanalysis"; Hardt notes, AO p. 109]. Deleuze gives the example that the task would not be to ask the meaning of a patient's phrase "The director is coming", but what allowed the patient to create "this little machine" [source: Chaosophy, p. 67].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Take a symptom, fantasy or habit. (2) Ask how it works, step by step: what it connects with, what triggers it, what it produces, what it stops. (3) Note where it jams or breaks down. (4) Ask what else it could connect to.
Example language (illustrative): "Don't tell me what it means. Tell me how it works. What switches it on? What does it make happen?"
Watch for: Slipping back into interpretation. It is working when the client describes concrete connections and finds alternative couplings.

4.16 Second positive task: social investments of desire

Purpose and when to use: Unconscious libidinal investments of the social field differ from preconscious investments of interest. They polarise between a paranoiac-reactionary pole and a schizoid-revolutionary pole [source: Wikipedia "Schizoanalysis" summarising AO's theses]. Use this when the client's distress is tied to work, politics, media, group identity, or a desire for their own oppression. Guattari's "everybody wants to be a fascist" theme belongs here [uncertain: Chaosophy essay].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Ask what the client wants from institutions such as work, nation, group, platform or leader, beyond self-interest. (2) Notice where they desire what harms them: hierarchy, certainty, an enemy. (3) Explore which groups make them more rigid or exclusionary, and which open them. (4) Link to subject-group work (4.3).
Example language (illustrative): "It costs you a lot to stay in that job. What do you get from belonging there that isn't money?"
Watch for: Proselytising your own politics. It is working when the client sees how their desire is caught in social formations and makes freer choices.

4.17 Metamodelling the client's own models

Purpose and when to use: Schizoanalysis does not choose one model. It maps how existing models (religious, scientific, psychoanalytic and others) organise self-reference, and treats these models as material [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 22, 59–61]. Use it with clients who bring strong explanatory systems: a diagnosis, faith, astrology, neuroscience, previous therapy.
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Ask the client to explain their difficulty through their own model. (2) Explore what the model makes possible and what it forbids. (3) Ask whether other models could sit alongside it. (4) Use the most generative parts.
Example language (illustrative): "When you think of this as 'my bipolar', what does that let you do, and what does it stop you doing?"
Watch for: Undermining a protective model, such as faith or a diagnosis that gets someone services. It is working when the client handles models flexibly.

4.18 Co-management of treatment and openings to the outside world

Purpose and when to use: Patient and carer co-manage the vectors of treatment and use openings onto the outside world [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 7, 11]. Use from the start, and especially for long-term clients.
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Decide together the format: frequency, setting, who else is involved, and whether some sessions take place outside the room. (2) Review the means regularly. (3) Actively look for links outside therapy, such as courses, groups, work and associations. (4) Let the client propose ending or changing.
Example language (illustrative): "What should these sessions be for, this month? And what outside here could do some of this work?"
Watch for: Abdicating professional responsibility, especially around risk. It is working when the client steers the format and outside links grow.

4.19 Transferential grafts and institutional "modelling clay" (psychosis)

Purpose and when to use: Use with psychotic clients where ordinary transference does not operate. Guattari drew on Gisela Pankow's "transferential grafts" and wrote that at La Borde the modelling clay is the institutional "matter" generated by workshops and meetings [source: De Leros à La Borde, p. 66, via Radical Philosophy]. Pankow herself used actual modelling clay with patients [uncertain: Pankow's own texts].
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Offer concrete shared materials and settings as the medium of contact, for example a workshop, an object or a joint task, rather than relying on verbal transference. (2) Work through what the client makes or does. (3) Let attachment graft onto activities and places as well as onto you.
Example language (illustrative): "We don't have to talk. Would you help me sort these seeds for the garden?"
Watch for: Intrusiveness. Respect withdrawal. It is working when the client re-engages through the shared material.

4.20 Working with partial enunciators (polyphony)

Purpose and when to use: Guattari extends Lacan's partial object into the "partial enunciator" [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 13–14]. Subjectivity speaks through many components and voices, including objects, places and machines. Use with voices, multiplicity and fragmented speech, and with clients who speak through others or through objects.
Steps [synthesis]: (1) Identify who or what speaks in the client: voices, roles, a song, an object, a social-media persona. (2) Give each one room: ask what it says and wants, and to whom. (3) Look for new enunciators that could join, such as a new activity, group or creative medium.
Example language (illustrative): "When the voice says that, who is it speaking to? Is there anything else in your life that speaks back?"
Watch for: Reinforcing distressing voices. Coordinate with psychiatric care. It is working when the client's range of positions to speak from widens.

4.21 Analysing and reinventing your own position

Purpose and when to use: Practice must be continually reinvented or it becomes deathly repetition. Guattari criticised "transferential neutrality supposedly founded upon a scientific corpus" and dogmatism [source: Three Ecologies, pp. 38–39]. Freud "invented the rituals of the session", and these are a choice, not a law [source: Three Ecologies, p. 55]. Use this routinely and when stuck.
Steps [synthesis]: (1) List your fixed rituals: room, timing, chair, note-taking, phrases. (2) Ask what each does to this client. (3) Vary one ritual deliberately, explain why, and note what happens. (4) Take the material to peer or group supervision, which works best when mixed across disciplines (see 4.2).
Example language (illustrative): "I've been running these sessions the same way for months. I'd like to try something different. Shall we meet while walking next time?"
Watch for: Novelty for its own sake, and boundary drift. It is working when the client responds to the change and you stop reproducing your own refrains.

Not included or not verified. Guattari's early case writing ("Monograph on R.A.", 1956, in Psychoanalysis and Transversality) and the full "La Borde: A Clinic Unlike Any Other" essay are not drawn on. No techniques are drawn from them [uncertain]. La Borde's acceptance of neuroleptics and, at times, ECT was a medical decision outside this guide. Refer such decisions to psychiatric colleagues.

5. Handling problems

The primary sources say little about problem management in individual therapy. Most of this section is [synthesis], and where I lean on a primary text it is cited.

Stuck client: the same story, the same session.

Treat the stuckness as a hardened refrain, possibly in the therapy itself [source: Chaosmosis, pp. 16–18, 26 on hardened refrains]. Listen for the small forward-pointing detail and act on it (4.10). Vary one ritual of the session (4.21). Try a heterogeneous activity (4.7). If nothing moves after several such experiments, review the frame (4.1) and consider adding a group or another practitioner (4.4) [synthesis].

"Resistance."

Don't read refusal as the client's defence alone. First analyse what in the setting or group produces it: fixed roles, the dual relation, the institution's demands [source: "Transversality" on rigid transference and group phantasy, PT p. 111]. Ask what the refusal does and what it protects (4.15). Offer the client more say over format (4.18) [synthesis]. Illustrative: "Maybe saying no to me is the most sensible thing you've done this week. What are you protecting?"

Overwhelm, decompensation or too-fast deterritorialisation.

Opening territories can destabilise clients, especially psychotic ones. Guattari notes psychosis can occur when a person's refrain is threatened [source: Chaosmosis, p. 17]. D&G also counsel caution against too-sudden destratification [uncertain: A Thousand Plateaus, "How do you make yourself a Body without Organs?"]. Responses [synthesis]: slow down; restore or protect existing refrains and territories; reduce the number of experiments; increase concrete supports such as routine, sleep, shared tasks and contact with the constellation (4.4); and involve psychiatric care. For suicidal thoughts or risk to others, follow your standard structured risk assessment and safety planning. Schizoanalytic aims never override it.

Non-adherence: the client doesn't do the experiments.

Experiments are not homework to be complied with. Ask what happened instead, and what that tells you about the assemblage (4.15). Check whether the experiment was the client's or yours (4.18). Make it smaller and more concrete, or attach it to a group or an activity with its own momentum (4.6, 4.7) [synthesis].

Ruptures in the relationship.

Guattari accepts the risk of being wrong when you intervene actively [source: Chaosmosis, p. 18]. When a non-neutral move misfires, own it plainly, ask what it set off, and hand the next decision to the client [synthesis]. In institutions, use the transferential constellation: another person may hold the link while the rupture is worked through (4.4) [synthesis]. Illustrative: "I pushed the driving course and it felt like my project, not yours. I got that wrong. Where do you want to go from here?"

Modality-specific difficulties [synthesis].

No institution around you. Most of Guattari's practice assumes a collective setting like La Borde. In private practice, build a network: groups, community projects, colleagues, family members with consent. Do not pretend that the dual session is transversal.
Romanticising madness. Theory can tempt therapists to celebrate breakdown as breakthrough. Keep in mind that La Borde practised psychiatry and treated suffering [source: Dosse, Chaosophy, p. 19]. Never discourage needed medication or care.
Jargon as a new master discourse. Using "deterritorialisation", "BwO" or "rhizome" with clients can recreate the authority Guattari criticised [source: Chaosmosis, p. 11, on distrusting suggestion and authority]. Use the client's language.
Politicising the client. The second positive task (4.16) can slide into imposing your politics. Ask, don't instruct.
Role-blurring and boundaries. Rotating roles, working alongside clients and meeting outside the room raise risks: dual relationships, confidentiality and exploitation of patients' labour. Agree explicit limits, document the rationale, follow your professional code and local law, and get supervision. Never accept personal, financial or sexual relationships with clients, whatever the theory.
Groups that won't become subject-groups. Some groups prefer subjugation. Name that preference as group phantasy (4.3) and accept slow progress. Don't force self-management.
Evaluation and services. Funders often demand manualised outcomes. Describe the work in terms of concrete goals and activities, and use standard outcome measures if required. Nothing in schizoanalysis forbids that.

Sources

Sources: