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In the 1970s the Freudian orthodoxy in Europe and the U.S. encountered a number of challenges from outside the psychiatric establishment. Two such challenges appeared in Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1972/1977) and Robert Pinsky's 1975 “Essay on Psychiatrists” (1996). The two texts not only presented a critical reaction to Freud but also, either explicitly or implicitly, articulated alternatives to Freudian views on the self and its relation to society. Deleuze and Guattari sketched out a perspective they called “schizoanalysis” and Pinsky, as a number of critics have suggested, implicitly offered the poet as a rival to the psychiatrist.1 This article places Pinsky's “Essay on Psychiatrists” in a contextual relation with schizoanalysis, assessing how the poem reveals the respective strengths of poetry and philosophy in a previous historical period of reaction against Freudian orthodoxy.
It should be noted that Deleuze has not often appeared as a partner in dialogue amongst critics and scholars of poetry, despite his popularity in the related field of film studies. One exception is Jon Clay's Sensation, Contemporary Poetry and Deleuze (2010), which applies Deleuzian terminology—such as “univocal ontology,” the simulacrum, the “order-word,” and “deterritorialization” (pp. 7-9)—to the study of British avant-garde poetry. Interpreting works that resist facile understanding, Clay uses philosophy to make sense out of the sometimes bewilderingly rich textures of British experimental poetry. In