One knows that one is hardly in safe hands when he suggests the possibility that Deleuze was at one time in analysis with Lacan, which was never on the cards. Indeed, anyone with a serious interest in the intricacies of the work of Deleuze and Guattari would be well advised to avoid this poorly written hatchet job. The house style is to write with a symbol, an exclamation mark utilised to flag up yet another scornful insistence. It is beyond the scope of this review to catalogue the innumerable instances in which there appears to be a wilful inability to comprehend what is at stake in so many of the thinkers’ ideas. So one or two instances will unfortunately have to suffice. At one point, there is the claim that Foucault et al. are engaged in vicious, untenable and ultimately anti-human ideas with the suggestion that ‘man is dead.’ There is no sense that what is at stake is the issue of the perniciousness of identity, of the collapse into the closure of representation: anything that we take ourselves to be we are not. All marinated in Weatherill’s pining for “the original myth (that) installed binary gender differentiation” (13). There is a repeated confusion between self and identity; again he has this to say: “The absent Other (aka God, the Father) absents the self, nullifies the self, after torturing it with its worthlessness. The subject thus identifies with a nothing, an absence” (159). A nothing is not ‘not anything’ and the primacy of presence is quite other than an absence. Similarly, the Deleuzian notion of the ‘body without organs’ is read off as a valorisation of disembodiment, of ‘disincarnation,’ rather than a proposal offering an emancipation from the normative organisation, codification of our embodied selves. So much of this is written with an academic veneer which veils that so much is little more than the reiteration of much that could be situated under the sign of old school, right wing cant – in so many ways no more than an old fashioned conservative, mourning the diminution of religious faith and the traditional family.
But let us leave considerations of Weatherill’s primary thrust to one side and examine his claim to think psychoanalysis differently, which ultimately boils down to the wish to resituate Freudian psychoanalysis within a ‘radical Christian (or more pertinently Catholic) perspective.’ The claim being that it is ‘orthodoxy (that) is radical,’ heroic even, and the orthodoxy that is being promoted is that the analyst knows best. Why? The analyst “…because of his training, reading, experience, etc., may have a liberating vision of the patient way in excess of the latter’s repetitive self positing” (139; my italics). In other words, the one who comes for analysis is inherently to be seen as less than – or, at the very least, there is a strong tilt in that direction. Another culling is this: “God asks Job who he is? Who is this whose ignorant words cloud my design in darkness? (Job 38:2). And Job, like every analysand, cannot answer!” (202; my italics). All converges on this insistence: “In order to get beyond the resistance which is always present, some aggressive appropriation will be required by the analyst and some reciprocal submission by the analysand” (137; my italics). We may recall Derrida’s Resistances of Psychoanalysis and his subtle rebuking of Freud, who had this to say about Irma. She seemed to Freud “foolish because she had not accepted (Freud’s) solution. Her friend would have been wiser, that is to say would have yielded sooner” (Derrida, 1998: 9). As if the desire of the analyst is that the other should yield, submit to the superior wisdom of the analyst: you will be in truth if you do not resist my solution. It is this concept of the analyst with the assumption of his or her superior wisdom, a form of looking down on the other in-mixed with an imposition of a particular world view that will inevitably provoke immense resistance. Or at least some of us would vehemently hope so.