A Brief Response to Daniel Tutt's Recent Essay on Micro-Politics

Brief Overview of Tutt's Essay

A quick response to Daniel Tutt's recent essay on Micro-politics: 

People should read the essay, it's good, but it has its limits and makes a few small factual errors about the history of psychoanalysis. I think these occur not because of any ignorance on the part of Tutt, but likely because of the limits of the academic journal paper format. All the same, these moments require elaboration which I will include later in this blog entry.

But back to Tutt's essay: The first few pages demonstrate a generous and good faith understanding of the Anti-Oedipus (AO) text.

There is present in these first few pages a subtext that is important to note - that AO is an attempt at  rigorously critiquing the epistemology of Psychoanalytic concepts, claims, and practice as opposed to a complete delegitimization or discrediting of psychoanalysis. That is, other critiques prior to AO  - i.e., Popper, Kuhn, American cognitive scientists, etc. - don't critique as much as they claim psychoanalysis is charlatanry or pseudoscience. In other words, AO sets out to salvage what makes sense of psychoanalysis and reconstruct a new leftist positive project that liberates, not enslaves.

This is important to Tutt's argument as Tutt will show that D and G's understanding of psychoanalysis is flawed, therefore so are their conclusions, and therefore the leftwing project drawn from those conclusions is ultimately ineffective. This critical thrust doesn't come until around page 4 when Tutt claims the main points grounding D and G's critique are uncharitable, overstated, or outdated; these are errors that contribute towards the authors' polemical ultra-left romanticized conception of human behavior, one that has not only not had the effect of leveraging the fragmentation and decoding of capitalism towards leftist goals and ends, but has in fact succeeded in the opposite - it has contributed to right wing thought and behavior while capitalism progresses unphased by any of the Deleuzoguattarian lexicon.  

Tutt's Argument 

The argument can be broken into three points, two of which are better responded to in an academic lens, one of which better responded to in a clinical lens.

First the points better responded to in an academic lens; 

1: The analyst as it appears in AO is a boogeyman -  as a practitioner or intellectual figure they are         not as influential or powerful in society as the authors imagine, not then and even less so now; 

2: Later in life Deleuze walked back on his politics with Guattari;

Now for the point that is better discussed in a clinical lens. 

3: D and G respond to an understanding of the Oedipus Complex that most Lacanians would not             themselves endorse as being fair or accurate, and additionally, there are specific left wing                       Lacanians     who do not endorse the Oedipal complex as understood by D and G. 

I think Tutt's thinking is very sound, and over all these are fair points here that Deleuzioguattarians do not often properly contend with, but I do think some of the psychoanalytic specific facts are wrong here.

'Academic' Response to Argument 

The academic - and somewhat boring - response to the first two points; 

1: The analyst a boogeyman, not as influential or powerful as they are made to seem? It is true D and G - mainly G - are hyperbolic in the AO text, but we should give them credit where credit is due, and their critique of the bourgeoise position of the analyst deserves credit. In other words, this point of Tutt's is simply not supported by the facts. 

At the time of the writing and publishing of AO, Psychoanalysis had indeed declined since its peak in the 50s, but still remained highly influential and widespread, and the popular analysts of the near past and current times where by today's standards filthy rich and living lavish bourgeoise lifestyles. 

Regarding the widespread influence - from the 60s-80s the government and people of America had been thoroughly captivated by analysis; the CIA had taken an interest in promoting what it liked about analysis - i.e., its potential for understanding and controlling behavior -  by involving analysts or analyst adjacent psychiatrists in their MK Ultra plans (don't forget Marcuse was on the payroll for the proto-CIA org that would soon become the CIA...) while simultaneously demoting what it didn't like -i.e., its revolutionary aspects - by squashing any psychoanalysts that dissented (Reich, communist who pre-dated Marcuse in his Freudomarxism was silenced by the US gov't). This is indisputable. meanwhile in entertainment, psychoanalysis thoroughly penetrated all aspects of Hollywood: psychoanalytic themes and imagery, as well as direct depictions of analysts or analyst-like figures appear on the screens in 70s and 80s films, while behind the scenes, popular Hollywood directors (Woody Allen anyone?) either became analysands themselves or had psychoanalysts on set to aid in method acting. Psychoanalysis was both a threat to be harnessed and defeated by the government, and an exciting method to be utilized in the making of popular media. 

Regarding wealth and lavish lifestyles - two brief examples: in the 30s, Freud was a friend of the Bonaparte family, wealthy enough to travel the world and evade the Nazis. The less wealthy and connected were not as privileged. He saw mostly wealthy, well to do patients, though he did occasionally see less wealthy patients for free. Lacan was rich. An analysand of Lacan came to my institute years ago and shared that Lacan was, by today's standards (factoring in inflation and exchange rates) making millions of dollars mainly by cramming several patients - many wealthy, some not - into an hour via his 'variable length session' technique. We should be suspect of a new theoretical concept that challenges the established ethical checks and balances of the practice of analysis by introducing the reduction of the amount of work on a whim that in doing so -whether intentional or not - enables a practitioner to make more money by fitting 5-10 clients into an hour, instead of 1. Bankrolled by this variable length money, he flew all around the world, including my home city in America, and would visit fashionable restaurants where he almost always picked up the tab. 

Nearly all analysts at the time charged for a session a fee that would require patients to sacrifice other expenses such as food and rent, and payment was considered part of the transference relationship meaning it was non-negotiable and had clinical implications. Even Guattari made money off his status as analyst - he ran a hospital, charged patients high fees at times, and was given hundreds of thousands of dollars by the French government to research other country's intellectual activity. With this money he funded a playboy-like lifestyle: he had a family and a lover on the side, a drug addiction, a fast car, a house, a and a separate apartment for his lover, etc., and none of that was cheap. 

To make my point - name a group of intellectuals at the time that can say they lived this lavishly and made this much money without being in crime, the government, Hollywood, or doing hard labor. Name a population who lived like this simply by talking, listening, thinking, and publishing papers. Communists, existentialists, deconstructionists, Heideggerians, feminists, etc., can make no such claim. At the time, psychoanalysis was the intellectual or academic-adjacent profession to make the most amount of money by doing the least amount of work. If we step out of the academic world and into the medical one, if you were a psychoanalyst you may make as much as someone with an MD (Medical degree), if you weren't already an MD who studied and practiced psychoanalysis that is. 

One might argue that a few choice members of a group making good money does not equate to the depiction of the analyst in AO as the 'new priest.' That this is more a question of the widespread influence of psychoanalysis on the culture at large. Well, research on the amount of analysts and analysands in training, and the wealth of institutes (based on student tuition prices and student numbers)  indicates that since the 80s and 90s, the amount of people training and in training in Psychoanalysis has significantly declined. However, what this really means is that according to the numbers, psychoanalysis does not significantly decline in popularity until the 80s, not the 60s and 70s, so well after D and G have finished AO and gone on to soften their blows and focus more on evolutionary biology and literature in A Thousand Plateaus. 

(Interestingly, the prevalence of psychoanalytic citations in multiple disciplines declines in the 50s but actually surges between 68 and 72,  the time of AO - other less rigorous sources here - here - indicate the decline around the 80s, not 60s and 70s). 

In short, it would seem that psychoanalysis, though having declined from its peak influence in the 40s and 50s, actually begins to peak again the 60s and 70s, and only truly declines in the big picture trend in the 80s. Individual analysts themselves make a lot of money leveraging little work while finding ways to economize time. This is just capitalism. The analyst was not as revolutionary as we thought.

Moving on.

2:Tutt cites Steigler as endorsing Deleuze as walking back on his earlier work with Guattari. This becomes a sub-narrative in Tutt's text. The implication is that this could undermine the critique from the inside - even Deleuze didn't believe this shit! Here Tutt subtly plays into a longstanding narrative of splitting Deleuze and Guattari, painting Deleuze as a mature academician and Guattari as a undisciplined nut (Zizek says Deleuze was a genius, but Guattari a traitor who should be shot; Justin Murphy similarly paints D as a fatherly academic and Guattari as a wayward nut, etc., many academics remove Guattari from the title when discussing the texts, etc.). This is a digression, however. 

Back to Steigler: One wonders, however, if this is Steigler's interpretation or if there are primary texts where Deleuze explicitly states this, or at least implies it? Even better - does Deleuze begin to behave in a way that measurably indicates a shift away from his politics with Guattari? I've seen no such texts or accounts. If they are out there, send them over! On contrary, Deleuze seems to endorse Guattari as a brilliant thinker and close friend right up until his death. Of course someone as smart as Deleuze could endorse this and also believe, secretly or otherwise, that Guattari is politically wrong, but that is not clear. 

Tutt mentions later in his text that Deleuze's later essay on the control society seem to imply a change in politics, but again this seems to be a judgment, not a direct endorsement from Deleuze himself. To say this round about judgment supports the idea that Deleuze questioned the AO project seems a stretch. An alternative explanation is that Deleuze is a true academic writing from a place of his own training, and education, while Guattari was a psychoanalyst, activist, and not a true academician by trade. Their authorial voices - i.e., writing styles, concept use, approach, etc., - will differ when they are writing by themselves and not together. Additionally, later in his life Guattari himself strays from his own earlier work as well as his work with Deleuze. In in '89 and '92, around the same time as Deleuze's essay, Guattari writes The Three Ecologies and Chaosmosis, arguably his clearest, least theoretical texts that show a similar maturity to that of Deleuze's. The former looks at concrete ways of understanding political behavior through three points of reference and in some ways departs from the AO project, and the latter focuses on the concrete ways psychotherapy or psychoanalysis can leverage aesthetics to craft a new ethics that can change behavior to better focus on reachable political goals rather than abstract moralism. In fact, even prior to this A Thousand Plateaus looks to correct many of the oversteps of AO. The shift in politics is not evidence for a weakness or lack in the original political project, but more evidence to one of Tutt's own points - that you have to change your ideas as time goes on. More on this later. 

Psychoanalytic or Para-academic Response to Argument - Anti-Oedipus is a Pharmaceutical or Therapeutic Intervention, not a Book

Why depart an academic lens for the clinical one? 

The less abstract answer: the form and content of the text is clinical in nature, not academic. 

First the content:

Throughout AO Deleuze and Guattari explicitly respond to Freud's case studies - the Ratman, the Wolfman, little Hans, Jung's dream to Freud - and point how Freud's bias - the ideas he has decided on as being right in advance based on his own thinking and experience - distort the clinical material and lead to a therapeutic intervention and conclusion that would not otherwise be drawn. The implicit argument is that if these patients and their thoughts / behaviors were viewed from a less biased perspective, clinical material may lead to different outcomes. From this perspective comes the idea that if we are going to use Psychoanalytic or Freudian concepts to understand behavior and ultimately politics, we may want to critique some of the epistemological biases that are present in the base texts. 

Let's ask again - why depart an academic lens for a clinical one? 

The more abstract answer, and one that regards form not content: the former (academic) threatens to treat AO as a static text that aims to capture, represent, and reproduce an image of the world - i.e., an accurate account of the history of behavior and ideas, how reality works, how people think, etc. -while the latter (clinical) looks at the text in the way D and G would encourage us to look at it - as a finite, time-sensitive, non-representational tool meant to temporarily capture subjectivities in a moment in time and activate a target group towards behaving differently.

The AO project sets out to make people do things in the world, not to make an accurate statement about the world itself. Afterall, it is Guattari who is quoted as encouraging us to 'fuck around and make shit up.' In this sense, in the big picture of left wing politics the text is closer to a clinical intervention a therapist may use in a lengthy treatment with a stuck, depressed patient than it is a collection of facts and prescriptions for political action. 

In contemporary psychoanalysis when an analyst (from some schools of thought) has a patient (only a certain kind) who is depressed, stuck in a rut, etc., the analyst, working from within the transference relationship, may act or speak in controlled yet provocative manner in order to illicit a reaction from the patient, 'shake up' or break the status quo pattern. Lacan was infamous for this, we need only imagine his variable length session and 'punctuation' technique if we want an example. Guattari took after the master by providing provocative responses to his patients - 'you say you want to kill yourself, what keeps you from doing it, what keeps you coming here and telling me about it?' 'you're so depressed, why haven't you given up, what makes you come here and torture me with your complaints?' etc. 

In Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, which overlaps with psychodynamic theory in many ways, this is called 'being irreverent.' In other forms of contemporary cognitive therapy it may take the form of 'paradoxical suggestion' or 'paradoxical intervention' where the practitioner playfully but without abandoning technique suggests doing more of the obstructive or dystonic behavior the patient has been trying to change without progress, or been stuck complaining about. 

These things work. I've used them (It's important to note that this only works with some patients whom the practitioner has developed a strong working relationship with, or if the patient is in hospitalized care where they are supervised for safety following a session. There are patients who will not take to this, and there are therapist who cannot pull it off).

The left was in a moment of crisis, defeat, it was not clear that more of the same would get the left out of the rut, so an exciting, crass, provocative, irreverent, aesthetic, Nietzschean text that makes the case for scrapping everything and starting over from scratch was invented. Makes sense.

Clinical problems require clinical solutions. This gets us back to our 3rd point.

3: D and G's critique is outdated because of the left Lacanians? At the time of '68-72 was the critique outdated, or does it appear outdated now, in hindsight? And are these left Lacanians in the room with us now? Who are they, and did they exist then, and if so, what percentage of the psychoanalytic community at large did they compose? These would be helpful things to know for this to be more believable. 

From the clinical angle it's not so important that a sect of left Lacanians endorse a different understanding of the oedipus complex than the one D and G critique. What theorists endorse in their texts, lectures, etc., what academic leaning analysts theorize about, etc., and what actually happens in the therapy room between the therapist and patient are two very different things. 

Guattari is an analysand of Lacan who is an analyst with analysands himself, and he's in analytic and activist circles, so the critique of Oedipus is very real for him. He's lived it.

I'll tell you from my own experience, what the analysts in my institution endorsed in their papers, books, lectures, and classes, and what they actually did in the analysis room often amounted to two different things. There is a certain degree of social pressure that psychoanalysts as heads of bureaucratic institutions must contend with, and these pressures shape their social facing selves, but not always their practicing selves. 

One may argue that all of this doesn't change the fact that the political project failed. It did, yes. But this would be a more damning point if it wasn't the case that Anti-Oedipus failed where Marxism also failed; more damning if the main line Marxist tradition had  clearer victories under its belt. This somewhat polemical comparison of mine cuts to the heart of issue for Marxism: What even counts as evidence of a Marxist victory these days? The right will tell you America is already a communist state, with Marxists seeping into every educational institute, etc. The left will tell you that the world has been shifting right for decades and that we're on the brink of fascism. It gets harder to critique an alternative to Marxism when it is hard to identify evidence based criteria for your project working, moving the dial in the right direction, etc. 

The bottom line is AO created a reaction within the left during its time, and for decades after. Perhaps that was it's goal. Fisher said that 'Nick Land was the opposition the left needed' to strengthen itself. AO fulfills the same function. It may not be completely correct, it may not succeed where it claims it predecessor failed, but it does make fair points of criticism about the Marxist and Freudian positions. A good critique does not need to have the answer, just show that the current answer is not doing the trick, and maybe that helps the predecessor improve in epistemic rigor. 

Jung vs. Freud - Undermined by Winnicott (Science vs. Mysticism; Materialism vs. Spiritualism; Practice vs. Theory).

Introduction

Jung and Freud discourse pops up now and again on Twitter. The discussion is tired - mysticism vs. scientism, etc., Buried beneath this uncharitable interpretation and its stale caricatures of the Jung and Freud story is a more interesting one waiting to be told. 

It is a story of how at times our theoretical models or practical programs accidentally achieve the opposite of what they set out to achieve; a story of how at times a narrative is constructed that hinges upon a thinker that is often at odds or in tension with how a competing narratives makes use of that same thinker. 

For example, Deleuze and Guattari frame Jung as a thinker grounded in the 'outside,' culture, history, i.e., a champion of esoteric yet epistemologically sound materialism, etc. With this gesture they oppose him to Freud, a thinker they understand as unwittingly mired in the epistemological error of cognitive bias, filtering all his data through a predetermined theory with a predetermined conclusion - in this case  the patient's personal history, thereby severing the ties to the greater world and thus turning away from scientific-materialism and instead towards a personal psychologism. 

Here, Jung is on the side of the revolutionary, the schizoanalyst, etc. while Freud is on the side of a reconstruction of human behavior and thought that only benefits the hegemonic power, i.e. the state, the family, etc. If we've read D and G, we all know the argument. And yet Jung himself is rightly criticized by others for committing the same error as Freud, the error of venturing into the inside - a personal psychologism -  only to fail to connect internal experiences with the outside, to fail at a materialist project. Similarly, Freud is viewed as reclaiming materialism by rooting thought in behavior, personal or cultural, in the body, and is championed - if not critically - by the left. 

 How can Jung be both a revolutionary materialist whose answer to Freud's epistemological errors of personal psychologism was to venture into the outside and also be guilty of turning to personal psychological explanations that appear to be grounded in history but lack any connection to the material, i.e. somatic realm? How can Freud be an epistemologically erred thinker relying on personal myth and hegemonic concepts and also a true materialist co-opted by the left's attempts at materialism?  These are questions this essay explores - I aim to say we simply can't have it both ways for both thinkers!

The short answer, for now, is a reworking of the old 'if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear' question: If a theoretical model gets it wrong and there's no other model around to see it, does it still make an error? In a Kuhnian (and somewhat Zizekian sense - i.e., dialectical or Parallax process), theoretical models require one another to see one another and between their scopes and their tensions come some semblances of 'truth.'

To go Further Still: Winnicott and Jung

The the analysis of Jung that most exposes his error of personal psychologism - as far as my own research goes, which is admittedly accidental, and lacking in methodological rigor - starts with renown British pediatrician, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst Donald W. Winnicott's review of Jung's autobiography. 

I think its important to note this document and include it in the Jung vs. Freud discussion for two reasons; 1: I'm willing to bet most people haven't read this one off book review from 1964, so it's new literature in an old discussion, and 2: it's authored from someone deep within the high ranks of psychoanalysis, a true practitioner who did not engage in any theory that was not simply derived from or confirmed by direct patient experience; Winnicott's not a academic with an abstract bone pick, or a political activist with an agenda to push, he's an analyst doing what analysts do best - analyzing.

In his review of Jung's Memories, Dreams, Reflections (D. W. Winnicott, Review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections - International Journal of Psychoanalysis 45, 1964: 450-455)Winnicott makes a handful of succinct comments that reach far beyond that of a simple book review; as he comments on Jung's thinking and writing and the ruptured past of psychoanalysis (Jung vs. Freud, self-psych, ego-psych, drive theory, object relations, etc.) he also, unbeknownst to himself, anticipates the field's then future criticisms and derivatives, mainly that of Lacanian-Maoist/Marxist psychoanalysis and Schizoanalysis. In other words, here Winnicott provides a purely clinical take on what Deleuze and Guattari later approach from a theoretical angle (even if Guattari is a practicing analyst, and their theory is a theory of praxis).  

Winnicott is generous and charitable in his analysis of Jung, describing him as an analyst and thinker who should be read and understood; a complex man who is not to be reduced to a mystic, nor stripped of his status as a psychoanalyst. At the same time he understands Jung as a recovered childhood schizophrenic whose return from the realm of psychosis both allowed him deep insights into hidden truths about the world and also prevented him from reconciling his creative and destructive impulses, and, more importantly, prevented him from connecting these deep truths meaningfully to his own development and growth as a material body in space. 

This, Winnicott believes, is the main contributing factor to the break up of Jung and Freud, as well as the inability for 'classical' (i.e., Freudian) psychoanalysis to properly 'treat' schizophrenics. Freud was categorically incapable of understanding Jung's psychotic genealogy, Jung incapable of understanding Freud's neurotic genealogy. It's important to note I use this word 'categorically' deliberately in a Kantian sense as Winnicott in this text describes an unbroachable epistemological gap between Jung and Freud, 'Jung and Freud as two sides of the same coin, connected but unable to see one another' (an example reminiscent something out of a Zizek book or lecture on Parallaxism...). I.e., Winnicott is not speaking in superficial terms about two people misunderstanding one another, he is making an epistemological claim about discrete models of understanding distinct ways of being in the world related to ontological development (the way bodies and minds develop along certain paths determined by outside forces). 

This etiology of Jung can be easily dismissed if we consider it as a purely academic of theoretical gesture. It is far from this and should be viewed only from a practical perspective.

To illustrate, in analyzing one of Jung's famous dreams (the underground tomb) presented in the autobiography Winnicott writes the following:

"When Jung contemplated the idea of the erect penis in the place of the king on the throne in the underground chamber of his dream as a four-year-old he did not connect this with, for instance, a projection of his own phallic excitements. He seemed to fear that...an analyst would insist that he had seen an erect penis somewhere, but the thing an analyst would find lacking is any attempt to relate this with the four-year-old Jung's instinctual life..." 

Similarly, in analyzing a series of "thoughts" and "ideas" (really psychotic thoughts or fantasies) Jung reports about God shitting on the roof of a church destroying its walls, Winnicott writes 

"...again...Jung does not go one step further back and relate this to his own destruction of beauty. We could not expect to find Jung feeling God to be a projection of his own infantile omnipotence and the shitting as a projection of his own hate..."

For Winnicott this all culminates in Jung's search for "the center of the self" and his interest with the mandala which Winnicott understands as "a defense against spontaneity... a failure to come to terms with chaos... a flight from disintegration."

In what sounds like it could be a line straight from Deleuze and Guattari's work, Winnicot summarizes his position on Jung and selfhood: "the center of the self is a relatively useless concept. What is more important is to reach the basic forces of individual living..." As Deleuze and Guattari remind us, what are concepts but tools to be used in practical ways (the self = a drawing, the force of living = a map)? We will come back to this.

For Winnicott, Jung's work is the product and outcome of a body healing itself from the 'pathological' (life obstructing as opposed to life affirming) aspects of schizophrenia. It is therefore a flight from schizophrenia and the body as a reaction to first hand experiential knowledge of schizophrenia and the body (a turning away from the face of God in fear of annihilation) as opposed to Freud's flight from schizophrenia which was a reaction to a lack of first hand experiential knowledge of schizophrenia (for those who are curious, this is the psychoanalytic understanding of the difference between anxiety and fear: anxiety is fear of the unknown or the fantasy of the known, true fear is the recognition of a real object or internal object of an known experience; I am anxious about an upcoming exam, and I am fearful of the animal that will kill me, etc.). 

For Winnicott, Jung fails to hold two seemingly contradictory ideas at the same time - that his visions are universal in a sense, tapped into deep cultural and historical stories, from the outside, the result of noumena colliding, and also still necessarily  incredibly local, bound to his body and originating in his body, and subject to those metaphysical limits. Because of this Jung's thinking therefore remains incomplete (Kant here resolves Jung vs. Freud - his entire body of work can be viewed as synthesizing the outside world, the inside of the body, and the presence of God; a meeting of theology and behaviorism, i.e., psychology - the ghost in the machine). Only radical connection with the body, and rooting / grounding thoughts, fantasies, dreams, and visions - no matter how 'real' and worth investigating they may be in there cultural spiritual sense - to the base material of body makes them whole and actionable in a practical sense. 

For example, as an analyst, if a patient were to share with me a dream and describe for me how it relates to a fairy tale from the 18th century, I would express excitement, but wonder what it means that this patient dreamt the dream at this time in their life, reported it to me in this way, and what relation it has to his life, and what he may be hiding or unaware of given he has not explored this himself, etc. The question is not if dreams can accidentally or coincidentally synchronize with fairy tales, or even historical events of past or future, but why these tales or events were revealed through a dream at this very moment. For fun, in theological terms: it's not a question of 'does God exist, and does thou really, from time to time, choose a human to be thou messenger?' the question is - and this is the hero's question of film and myth - 'why me...why did God choose me?' 

But back to psychology - Deep history internalized in the body requires something actionable, otherwise it is an avoidance of the outside. Jung looked deeply inside himself to avoid seeing his true self in the outside (what practitioners will know in practice as the patient using insight as an avoidance strategy). 

This is all to say, reminiscent of Deleuze and Guattari's now beat to death phrase about 'the process,' Winnicott urges Jung to go further still. 

Similarly, Baudrillard reminds us that "Reality itself is too obvious to be true." We should remind ourselves frequently that "exploration of the self is too obvious to be exploration of the self." 

Going Further - Trouble in Schizoanalytic Paradise: Jung and Guattari (and Deleuze)

Winnicott's analysis of Jung exposes some tension in this all too-ready-made dichotomy between schizo-hero Jung and Oedipalizing Freud. This tension would be relatively insignificant if not for the following facts:

1. Winnicott is the most cited psychoanalyst in all of Felix Guattari's published notes and texts - even more than Lacan (I can find the exact source for this if pressed, at this moment of writing it escapes me and you'll have to accept the following: My own research shows Winnicott's name appears the most, and Fadi Abou-Rihan's book on D and G and Psychoanalysis may also corroborate this!)!
2. Jung, though not mentioned nearly as much as Freud in A Thousand Plateaus, plays a significant role in D and G's framing of the problems of psychoanalysis in that he is the thinker most explicitly opposed to Freud, and therefore opposed to the Oedipal structure D and G are critiquing. In fact, one could go as far to say that Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus champion Jung as an early schizoanalyst whose goal was to 'open up' analysis to the radical outside, the an-oedipal, the cultural, etc., whereas Freud wanted to reroute everything through the Oedipal and individual structure. 
3. It is well documented in autobiographies and academic texts that Deleuze read, researched, and was influenced by Jung.

So Deleuze read Jung and Guattari read Winnicott. This means they should know better!

I have no proof, but I'd like to imagine Guattari read Winnicott's review of Jung. Not just because Guattari clearly read Winnicott and Deleuze read Jung, but because both Deleuze and Guattari and Winnicott discuss the infamous '2 skulls' dream Jung presented to Freud; the dream that Freud interprets as Oedipal despite Jung feeling it to be about his inevitable break with Freud. And both D and G and Winnicott  treat the dream as an example of Freud's inability to understand schizophrenia. 

Whether Winnicott's critique of Jung was read by D and G and overlooked for not fitting the narrative, or perhaps was never read at all, the text still poses questions I believe the two thinkers would surely need to consider and mindfully respond to. 

Conclusion - Similar Narrative Tensions within Psychoanalysis

I've argued the basic evergreen, collegiate position that when a new piece of literature is added to a discussion it disrupts preexistent narratives and provides a potential space for new thought. Someone else will have to come up with the new thought. The only 'conclusion' I have here is the cliché that we should be careful about pitting thinkers against one another for philosophical or political arguments, as they are often more multi-faceted than they initially appear, and a true exploration of a thinker often undermines one's position.  

For now I want to point out one other place where narratives in psychoanalytic politics and political psychoanalysis can and should be disrupted, that of  the relationship between Lacanianism and Marxism / practice and theory.

Lacan almost never wrote about case studies, endorsed a purely theoretical model of analysis, and strove to shake off  concepts of measurability and replication as criteria for psychoanalysis being confirmed as a science (variable length sessions, variable pay, not using insurance, undermining institutional authority by granting degrees at a whim, allowing students to self-determine when they graduate as an analyst, etc.). As a result, the effect of Lacanianism on the world has largely been an academic one, not a practical one. There are far more psychoanalytic training institutes that are non-Lacanian than ones that are Lacanian, and far more practicing analysts that are non-Lacanian than there are ones who are Lacanian. There are many psychoanalytic academics and philosophers who do not see patients (Zizek being the most famous) who are Lacanians and few academics and philosophers who are non-Lacanians who do not see patients. We could go on with the permutations, but we get the idea. Lacanianism seems to find its place in pop-culture (seen in films, TV shows - most recently White Lotus). Lacanianism is the vehicle of pure theory and yet, building on Marcuse's Freudo-Marxism that looked to understand political behavior in terms of Freudian biologism, Lacanianism was esteemed in high regard as a true science by a Marxist thinker and has come to be tightly bound with many Marxist positions that endorse 'praxis' or practice as the main goal of intellectual theory. Clearly this is a tension. Lacanianism is not as 'praxis' oriented or critical as it thinks it is.

I don't meant to say any of this is 'bad.' I have some good Lacanian friends - some who practice analysis, some who don't; I enjoy some Lacanian literature, and I myself am a petty pop culture enjoyer! 

The real point is this - Winnicott's analysis of Jung somewhat disrupts the Deleuzo-Guattarian framing of opposing Jung to Frued, but what document(s) will help disrupt the narrative that Lacanianism is Marxist practice when in many ways it returns to abstract, theoretical and academic discussions - or worse, pop culture clichés  - that have little practical effect on people?

I don't know the answer to this question. A job for someone else.

But to return to the tree in the woods - 'if a theoretical model gets it wrong and no other model is around to see, does it still make an error' - question: Freud, Jung, Deleuze, Guattari, Lacan, Zizek, - they all need eachother. Concepts are tools, thinkers too. It's foolish to pick a favorite tool in your box when they all serve a purpose. 

Magic, Zero, Game Theory, Capitalism, Death Drive, 90s

Magic the Gathering is a card game invented in 1991. It is still widely played today.

The inventor of the game is a mathematician and computer programmer so naturally the rules of the game rely on a degree of math and computer science (though this would likely be true even if the inventor was not a mathematician as the rules of any game often rely on numbers and sequences). 

When playing Magic in order to 'cast' a spell one needs to pay its cost, so naturally one must have the required resources to pay. For popular games like Pokemon this resource is an 'energy' card. For Magic this resource is a land card that produces mana. 

In sum, a Magic deck is composed of spells and lands. Lands produce 'mana.' Mana is required for spells. 

Over the course of Magic's history, the 'powerful' spells have undergone a shift in their form and content; they've gone from being expensive in mana cost and singular in copy in a deck / game to being inexpensive in mana cost and redundant or multiple in a deck / game. 

That is, over time the increase in power of a spell has correlated with a reduction in its cost and an increase in its statistical presence in a deck of cards (your deck can contain no more than 4 of the same card in many formats of magic, and in some formats 1 of. In both formats, cheaper mana cost cards have prevailed over more expensive ones).

To win the game, old Magic players relied on a few big spells, while new Magic players run multiple copies of many smaller spells.

As the formats became more and more competitive - especially in the last few years - this trend has intensified and accelerated. In the last few years the game has seen the introduction of what are essentially zero cost spells. These spells literally have a 0 in their cost, or they have an 'alternative casting cost.' For example, the player may pay 2 life (phyrexian mana, which we will come back to later), or may remove a card in your hand from the game to pay the cost of a spell (so you don't need a land card in play to use it...), or pay 0 for a spell this turn but if you don't pay 5 next turn you automatically lose the game.

Over time the game incentivized and trended towards 0 cost for maximum value. This understandably made game matches go quicker.

What this says about Magic and its fun-level is one thing, but what it says about the structure of games and therefore reality in general is another.

I think this may be one example of how any system with rules (Game) may tend towards least amount of cost for most amount of value. Readers will find this familiar - it is not unlike what is often described as 'the capitalistic death drive.' As I and others have written about elsewhere, both capitalism and magic are about turning a 0 into a not-0; pulling something from nothing; creating surplus value of code from a deficit, etc. 

Another way of understanding this is that a game that does not optimize its move-sets for zero or near-zero efficiency will not survive the selection pressures / process. Occham's razor but for games. I theorize this could be based on the fact that this optimization allows for higher speed of play, more resolution of matches, and therefore and an overall more time to play more matches. This could mean more fun, or it could mean more practice, and the evolution part of our organism loves the meeting of fun and practice! In other words, the human brain - in the most inorganic, anti-subjective, and chemical sense - is tuned to and triggered by - addicted to even - processes that demonstrate efficiency trends towards zero. For these reasons, a competitive game with simpler and less costly ways of generating value and winning will likely interest the lizard brain more than a comparative one that does not check these boxes. 

So, I think Magic the Gathering, this 90s Math-Magic game, hacks into Outside flows. Computer science, Math, Magic, Zero, 90s? It's all there (as usual).

This latent tendency within the game is captured by the actual fantasy story narratives of the game as well. 

Creatures known as 'Phyrexians' - incredibly 90s Lovecraftian-Terminator Centobytes - are hellbent on 'compleating' or perfecting organisms by infecting them and turning them into agentless, soulless, melted-up bio-machines. A key word utilized in the Phyrexian narrative is 'process.' The end result is not what matters, the process of perfecting the body (in a Cartesian and Deleuzian-Guattarian sense) through mutilating it and fusing it with machine parts linked to a hive-mind is. These Phyrexian cards - no surprise here - often cost 0 mana and instead cost 'Phyrexian mana' which means the player can pay 2 of his life (players start with 20 life) instead of using a land card to produce mana. 

The latent Accelerationist elements of the card game are expressed directly in the narrative.

As a cherry on top: Years ago - perhaps 5 or 6 at this point - a Nick Land audiobook had, apparently from the Youtube uploader, been associated with a wizard card from Magic the Gathering (the video had an image of the MTG card edited to reference Land...).

This is not to say MTG is accelerationist, or anything banal like that (though it is funny Nick Land - Land = Mana). More so it is to say that when things tend to come out on top in the 'game' of life, they tend to show up in and around the same crowd - computer science and solid math, zero, magic, the occult, efficiency, etc.