Original Article

Dysfunctional capitalism: Mental

illness, schizoanalysis
and the epistemology of the negative
in contemporary cultural studies
Mark Schmitt
British Cultural Studies, Institute for English and American Studies, TU Dortmund
University, Emil-Figge-Str. 50, 44227 Dortmund, Germany.
E-mail: mark.schmitt@tu-dortmund.de

Abstract In cultural studies, neoliberal capitalism has been critically discussed in

connection with a rise of mental illness. Within this discourse, psychology and psy-
choanalysis are being ambivalently debated as either complicit with the capitalist
representational system or as potential tools to critically interrogate it. This paper
traces these arguments in publications by writers such as Mark Fisher and Franco
Berardi, and examines their relationship to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept
of schizoanalysis. It re-assesses Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas and concludes with an
outline for the complementary use of psychoanalytic theory and schizoanalytic ideas as
a meta-discourse within cultural studies.
Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society (2017). doi:10.1057/s41282-017-0057-9

Keywords: Neoliberalist capitalism; mental health crisis; schizoanalysis; psychoanalytic

cultural studies; meta-discourse

In the days to come, politics and therapy will be one and the same. […]. Capitalism will not
disappear from the global landscape, but it will lose its pervasive, paradigmatic role in our
semiotization. (Franco Berardi, The Soul at Work, p. 220)

Introduction

On 17 April 2015, only a few weeks before the General Election, The
Guardian published an open letter signed by 442 psychotherapists,

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

www.palgrave.com/journals
Schmitt

counsellors and academics calling for the Labour Party and others to address the
damaging effects of the coalition government’s austerity measures on the British
population’s mental health, arguing that

[t]he profoundly disturbing psychological and quality-of-life implications

of the coalition government’s cuts and policies have yet to be mentioned in
the election campaign. Counsellors and psychotherapists in the public and
private sectors find themselves at the coalface in responding to the effects
of austerity politics on the emotional state of the nation. The past five
years have seen a radical shift in the kinds of issues generating distress in
our clients: increasing inequality and outright poverty, families forced to
move against their wishes, and, perhaps most important, benefits
claimants (including disabled and ill people) and those seeking work
being subjected to a quite new, intimidatory kind of disciplinary regime.
(The Guardian, 2015)

Apart from blaming the Cameron government for this troubling situation, the
authors become even more explicit when it comes to naming the ideological
regimes held guilty for this state of affairs: ‘‘the wider reality of a society thrown
completely off balance by the emotional toxicity of neoliberal thinking is
affecting Britain in profound ways, the distressing effects of which are often
most visible in the therapist’s consulting room’’ (ibid.).1
The letter is remarkable for the way mental illness and therapists’ everyday
work with its effects on their patients is placed in a wider national-cultural
context. The psychological strain suffered by significant parts of the population
is metonymically representative of the ‘‘emotional state of the nation’’ – the
United Kingdom itself becomes a mental patient in desperate need of a session in
the consulting room. Indeed, the open letter’s argument resonates with a
considerable number of recent publications in the fields of cultural criticism,
sociology, philosophy, psychology and political activism that address the
interplay of capitalism (in its current neoliberal form), mental health and the
fields of psychology and psychoanalysis. By linking the emotional wellbeing of
individuals to the diagnosis of an acutely moribund national psyche requiring
immediate action, the open letter resembles diagnoses in a number of British
publications by Mark Fisher (2009, 2014), J.D. Taylor (2013), and Ron Roberts
(2015). While these publications particularly focus on the British version of
contemporary neoliberalism, Carl Walker (2008) and Franco ‘‘Bifo’’ Berardi
(2009) establish a connection between Western capitalism and what is largely
referred to as a mental health epidemic.
The sheer range of these publications alone testifies to the urgency of this
topic which, apparently, has become drastically acute in the years since the
2008 financial crisis. Even if the crisis is not always explicitly mentioned, it
looms in the background of each text as an event that proved to be a rupture in

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

the certainties of contemporary capitalism that also presented itself as an

opportunity for critics of capitalism to radically rethink capitalist structures in
search of an alternative. The years after the most acute moments of the crisis,
however, immediately demonstrated in an unforeseen way how the system that
had just seemed to collapse recovered and proceeded in the same way as before
the crisis. A profound sense of a lack of alternatives and a solidifying scepticism
concerning a supposed ‘‘secret state’’ that aligned itself with the banks are the
result. Janet Newman and John Clarke (2013) sketch this situation in their
contribution to the Kilburn Manifesto:

The banking crisis challenged the hegemony of such economic policies, but
did not displace them: indeed the state-sponsored buyouts of parts of the
financial sector can be viewed as interventions to prop up failing capital.
Any notion that the crisis would open up space for emergent rationalities –
expanded public spending to deal with the social consequences of crisis, a
less consumerist society more concerned with the sustainability of
resources and the quality of life, a renewed trust in public institutions
rather than private profit – was quickly deflected by governments anxious
to restore the pre-crisis status quo and even exploit the crisis to enable
further profit-taking. (p. 107)

This observation is shared by Mark Fisher, who considers capitalism as an

ideological form that has by now become a state of mind. Loosely drawing on
Lacanian terminology, Fisher’s (2009) concept of ‘‘capitalist realism’’ is designed
to explain how capitalist modes of thinking and acting have pervaded both the
imaginary and the symbolic sphere. Capitalism, according to Fisher, has, in a
cynical continuation of Margaret Thatcher’s dictum that ‘‘there is no alterna-
tive’’, rendered alternative concepts of economic and social life beyond
capitalism virtually impossible. ‘‘Capitalist realism’’ thus describes ‘‘the wide-
spread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic
system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative
to it’’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 2). Equally pessimistic, Berardi states in The Soul at
Work (2009) that ‘‘[t]here are no more maps we can trust, no more destinations
for us to reach. Ever since its mutation into semiocapitalism, capitalism has
swallowed the exchange-value machine not only for the different forms of life,
but also of thought, imagination, and hope. There is no alternative to
capitalism’’ (p. 131). Berardi’s concept of ‘‘semiocapitalism’’ – an all-pervading
ideological form of capitalism extending beyond the economic sphere and
infiltrating signifying practices, whose ‘‘semiotic regime’’ subjects citizens to an
‘‘excessive velocity of signifiers’’ that ‘‘stimulates a sort of interpretative hyper-
kinesis’’ (p. 181) – corresponds to Fisher’s notion of ‘‘capitalist realism’’.
In the following, I would like to take up Fisher and Berardi’s proposal to link
this notion of a dysfunctional economic and social system with no alternative to

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

widespread mental illnesses – an assumption that is shared by a number of

recent publications. Fisher (2009) argues that ‘‘capitalist realism’’ is ultimately
‘‘analogous to the deflationary perspective of a depressive who believes that any
positive state, any hope, is a dangerous illusion’’ (p. 5) – an argument that
strongly resembles Lauren Berlant’s (2011) observations on ‘‘the waning of
economic and fantasmatic infrastructures of the good life’’ (p. 260) in an age of
increased precarity. This ‘‘precarious present’’ (p. 193), brought about by the
social and economic fragmentations of neoliberalism, not only affects the bodies
of the labour force, but is similarly reflected in minds more and more prone to
mental conditions immediately caused by such insecurity. Considering imma-
terial labour and precarity under late capitalism, Berlant argues that the
perilousness of work fosters a range of nervous-system symptoms (such as
vulnerability, hyperactivity, restlessness) that are indicative of ‘‘a shift in […]
ordinary affective states’’ (p. 197). Within the line of argument I intend to
present in the following, the most important outcome of this shift is what
Berlant calls the ‘‘politically depressed position’’ (p. 27, italics mine). Such a
state is symptomatic of a sense of detachment felt by those overwhelmed by the
precariousness of contemporary capitalist living and working conditions. As I
will conclude, it is within this context that depression as a systemic condition of
late capitalism becomes charged with the potentiality of an epistemology – or
even a politics – of the negative.
What unites all of the aforementioned arguments is the underlying assump-
tion that capitalism in its current neoliberal form immediately affects the mental
wellbeing of large parts of the population and that the resulting mental
conditions are not only those of unfortunate individuals, but in fact part of a
‘‘‘mental health plague’ in capitalist societies’’, which suggests that ‘‘instead of
being the only social system that works, capitalism is inherently dysfunctional,
and that the cost of it appearing to work is very high’’ (Fisher, 2009, p. 19). It is
further argued that this ‘‘mental health plague’’ entails a political dimension –
that is, mental illness is considered in its cultural construction. This, in turn,
implies a decisive politicisation of the disciplines of psychology and psycho-
analysis. Such arguments are infused with psychoanalytic concepts (or elements
of them) and frequently situate themselves within a tradition of anti-capitalist
criticism best exemplified by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s two-volume
work, Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus,
and their anti-psychiatric stance. Recent texts by thinkers such as Berardi and
Fisher tend to call for a return to Deleuze and Guattari’s politicisation of mental
illness in relation to capitalism, taking as a model the latter’s concept of
‘‘schizoanalysis’’.
Rather than considering schizophrenia – be it as an actual illness or in the
form of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical figure of the ‘‘schizo’’ – Fisher and
Berardi’s work refigures schizoanalysis for a conceptualisation of more common
conditions in political terms. In particular, they focus on depression and anxiety

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

disorders as paradigmatic maladies of contemporary capitalism. In the

following, I will single out the intersections of mental illness, psychoanalysis
and politics in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of schizoanalysis, and its re-
interpretation in Fisher and Berardi’s work, in order to comprehensively assess
its potential for a cultural studies that seeks to interrogate these interconnec-
tions. Contending with Lawrence Grossberg (2014) that Deleuze and Guattari’s
emphasis on the multiplicity of power relations can contribute to a self-reflexive
form of cultural studies, I will argue for a ‘‘sceptical’’ use of psychoanalytic
theory in the study of neoliberalism.

Challenging Capitalism and Psychoanalysis

Mark Fisher’s theorisation of mental illness and capitalism is representative of a

return to a Deleuzian-Guattarian politicisation of psychiatric issues – an
approach he shares with, among others, Berardi, Ron Roberts and J.D. Taylor.
Even though at least two of these authors cannot be said to work in a strictly
‘‘Deleuzian’’ or ‘‘Guattarian’’ way (apart from Berardi, as I will elaborate
below), their arguments can be subsumed under the theoretical umbrella of the
anti-psychiatric movement of which Guattari was an active and formative part
in the 1960s and 1970s. Fisher’s, Berardi’s, Taylor’s and Roberts’ arguments,
however, all follow a similar pattern: they emphasise the alarmingly ‘‘epidemic’’
levels of depression and anxiety in contemporary Western societies, which are
related to systemic causations, i.e. capitalism in its neoliberal form is held
responsible for the growing rates of mental illness as well as for a misguided
approach to tackling mental illness. Finally, the writers proceed by proposing
counter-strategies that usually entail the need to work with and through mental
disorders in order to challenge the capitalist condition and its representational
systems.
Fisher (2009), for instance, considers the naturalisation of mental disorders to
be one of the representational means of maintaining the neoliberal state of
affairs by making maladies such as anxiety, depression and burnout issues of
individual concern, thus deflecting attention from their systemic causations:

Capitalist realism insists on treating mental health as if it were a natural

fact, like weather […]. In the late 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and
politics […] coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as
schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural,
but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of
much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which
is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated
by the NHS. […] [W]e need to ask: how has it become acceptable that so
many people, and especially so many young people, are ill? (p. 19)

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

Fisher sees a privatisation of mental illness as a direct result of the neoliberal

doctrines of individual meritocracy – capitalism’s tendency towards individu-
alisation rules out possible systemic causations by reducing explanations to
individual neurology and family backgrounds. The repoliticisation of mental
illness should therefore be a prime task for the left in challenging capitalist
realism.
Taylor argues in a similar way by relating the monitoring of mental illness
under British neoliberalism to Deleuze’s notion of the control society. For
Taylor (2013), drawing on statistics provided by Walker (2008), the drastically
rising levels of anti-depressant prescriptions are indicative of the ‘‘normalisation
of psychopharmacological treatments’’, which, in turn, is a consequence of the
individualising tendencies of neoliberalism. While the disciplinary mechanisms
examined by Michel Foucault – the hospital, the psychiatric clinic etc. – used to
treat and exert disciplinary control over collective bodies, the neoliberal control
society described by Deleuze has implemented mechanisms focussing on the
individual:

Psychopharmacology assumes that psychiatric disorders are malfunctions

of neuronal chemistry which can, through the correct rational application
of scientific intervention, be universally treated or managed. […] Disorders
are therefore caused by the individual and not the circumstances or
psychosocial conflicts around them, as psychoanalysis had previously
contested. In such a manner, neoliberal control permeates the entire ‘sick’
body: the discipline of visiting the therapist or the site of the clinic is
replaced with the continuous intervention of chemicals. (pp. 78–79)

Fisher and Taylor thus consider a complex network of interrelations between

the neoliberal mode of capitalism and the human psyche, both on an individual
and a collective level. Their argument rests on the Foucauldian assumption that
mental health needs to be regarded and analysed as part of a larger scheme of
biopolitics within neoliberal governmentality – a governmentality that ulti-
mately serves the maintenance of the collective workforce. Hence, individual
mental wellbeing is a matter of labour and economics. Acknowledging this
connection consequently necessitates the consideration of how the ‘‘medical-
ization of everyday life’’ results in ‘‘[p]olitical, social and interpersonal issues’’
being ‘‘mystified as disease processes’’ (Roberts, 2015, p. 44), with a focus that
not only isolates the institutions of psychology and psychiatry, but considers
them as embedded in economic processes.
Roberts therefore calls for a Marxist intervention into clinical psychology
(pp. 40, 45). Equally, Taylor (2013) explains the medicalisation of mental
illness within the capitalist logic of work: just as ‘‘[w]ork itself is the point of
control, generating an internal self-management of time, taking care of and

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

managing mental illness as an individual (medico-biochemical) issue controls

the population through the ideological power of work as self-management’’ (p.
80). This, however, leads to a curious paradox: the medicalisation of mental
illness serves to ‘‘get the depressed unemployed workforce back to work’’ as
quickly as possible (Parker, 2007, p. 99), insufficiently accounting for the very
fact that work conditions might be one of the core reasons for many of the
diagnosed disorders in the first place. As Taylor (2013) argues, ‘‘[o]ne-fifth of all
working days in Britain are estimated as lost due to anxiety and depression
forcing workers to take time off, a very shaky estimate given the stigma and
perceived weakness of openly telling managers of mental health problems’’ (p.
86).
For writers like Taylor, this paradox constitutes the entry point for newly
politicised psychoanalytic approaches. Since, apparently, clinical psychology is
suspiciously regarded as embedded in the logic of capital, psychoanalysis is
considered as an alternative. Taylor uses Freud’s interpretation of anxiety as an
‘‘indefinite state without object’’ (as opposed to fear that is always clearly
related to a specific object) to argue that the object of the anxiety gripping
increasing parts of the population must become known for the anxiety to be
overcome: ‘‘Although many workers are well aware what it is which causes their
anxiety and debt in the short-term, perhaps the time has come for a collective
therapeutic catharsis of the neurosis-anxiety of negative capitalism’’ (p. 86).
Fisher (2009) likewise turns to psychoanalytic theory and argues that the
capitalist reality principle is similar to what Lacan calls the Symbolic order, and
that one of the strategies to challenge capitalist realism could ‘‘involve invoking
the Real(s) underlying the reality that capitalism presents to us’’ (p. 18). This
could involve the Real of environmental catastrophes, but also what Fisher calls
the ‘‘aporias’’ within the naturalised order presented by capitalist realism. He
identifies the ‘‘mental health plague’’ (p. 19) and its naturalisation as an
individual biochemical defect as a paradigmatic example. A Lacanian approach
provides him with the conceptual tools to achieve a denaturalisation of
capitalism’s ideologemes. However, psychoanalysis itself has frequently been
criticised as being complicit with or constituted by capitalism. This, however,
causes a paradox if considered in the light of the aforementioned criticism: how
can the theories and the vocabulary of psychoanalysis be employed in the
critique of that with which it is said to be in part complicit? As Fisher’s
(sometimes eclectic) use of Lacanian concepts in conjunction with Deleuze and
Guattari’s re-appropriation of Freudian and Lacanian concepts shows, a
critique or deconstruction of neoliberal and capitalist ideologemes via psycho-
analysis is far from a theoretically and ideologically straightforward affair and
reveals several aporias.
The most evident conceptual problem becomes apparent when following
closely the different proposals outlined above. Taylor and Fisher take aim at
clinical psychology and neuroscience as disciplines complicit with neoliberal

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

doctrines, but their use of psychoanalytic theories implies that these offer a
progressive solution. Samo Tomšič (2015) summarises the problem in his
assessment of the political potential of (Lacanian) psychoanalysis:

Some leftist voices would probably claim that it [psychoanalysis] was

historically invented to be nothing more than a class-therapy, serving the
mental well-being of the bourgeoisie. Such critiques could easily find
theoretical support in Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, who […] strived to
show that several psychoanalytic currents actively contribute to the
normalisation of desire and thereby openly reproduce capitalist forms of
domination. […]. There are also the voices of free-market ideologists,
cognitive-behavioural therapists and neuroscientists, who immediately
recognise in psychoanalysis a time- and money-consuming practice,
incapable of providing society, that is, the demands of the market, with
what it requires: an adaptable and flexible workforce. So while for the
leftists all psychoanalysis does is normalise, for neoliberals it never
normalises enough and should therefore be abolished. (pp. 2–3)

The approaches by Fisher, Taylor, Roberts and others represent a similar

paradox. On the one hand, they try to come to terms with capitalism as a
particular psychic formation with severe psychological effects by mobilising
concepts of psychoanalytic theory, while, on the other, both psychoanalysis (or
parts of it) and clinical psychology are often considered by the same authors to
be in some form complicit with capitalism. It seems, then, that these recent
approaches struggle to come to terms with the fact that psychoanalysis offers a
vocabulary and an epistemic design that these particular kinds of anti-capitalist
criticism just cannot do without. So, to varying degrees, they seem to constantly
struggle with, for and against psychoanalysis.
In the context of cultural studies, this implies that a critical analysis of the
psychological effects of neoliberal societies on its members has to come to terms
with the paradoxes inherent in the discipline’s own design if it draws on
psychoanalytic concepts. Thus, the challenge for an analysis of the interrelation
of capitalism and the mental health plague that is perceived to be one of its
effects on a meta-level is to critically assess the theoretical vocabulary and the
epistemological conceptualisation of one’s own critical discourse. This is of
particular importance, since there is a considerable tradition of employing
psychoanalytic concepts for an analysis of capitalist cultures and societies that
Tomšič rather polemically labels ‘‘Freudo-Marxist’’ (p. 7) – among them
Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno and Erich Fromm.
Tomšič criticizes these earlier ‘‘Freudo-Marxist’’ approaches for failing to
account for the adaptability of capitalism. He also remarks on Freud and other
psychoanalytic theorists’ ambivalence towards politics and ideology. The core
of this problem is capitalism’s ‘‘vitalism’’:

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

The failure of Freudo-Marxism and other attempts to free the creative

potential of unconscious desire and of living labour suggests the conclu-
sion that capital is creative potential, that capital is Life, and that
capitalism is a specific form of vitalism. […]. The dynamics and
adaptability of capital – its capacity to mystify, distort and repress
subjective and social antagonisms, assimilating symptomatic or subversive
identities and so on – sufficiently indicates that capital should be
understood as life without negativity, or more precisely, that the efficiency
and the logic of capitalism is supported by a fantasy of such life,
subjectivity and society. (p. 7, italics in original)

This ‘‘vitalism’’ of capitalism as a system ‘‘without negativity’’ – which comes

close to Fisher’s definition of ‘‘capitalist realism’’ – thus requires an analytic
response that itself avoids falling into the ‘‘vitalist trap’’ (p. 7).2 In the following,
I will retrace Deleuze and Guattari’s influence on contemporary critiques of
neoliberalism, arguing that it is precisely the ‘‘negative’’ mode of their concept of
schizoanalysis that enables one to avoid such pitfalls.

Deleuzian-Guattarian Schizoanalysis and the Epistemology

of the Negative

As Ian Parker (2007) contends, psychoanalysis is an example of a practice

of control that constitutes the very stuff which it represses; at the very
moment that it shuts ‘irrationality’ out, it creates that irrationality as
something that may then erupt at times of crisis, as if it were always
already there. In this sense, psychoanalysis is rather like capitalism, for
capitalism creates the very collective force that will be able to overthrow it.
This is not surprising, since psychoanalysis came into being as a
psychological practice to address the particular forms of alienation that
capitalism produced; psychoanalysis and capitalism are twins, even if one
can be used to highlight contradictions in the other. (p. 178)

Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus (1972), written during the aftermath of

May 1968, can be argued to have anticipated Parker’s comparison of
psychoanalysis and capitalism. Their book takes the form of a polemic that
approaches what they believe to be a capitalist representational system through
a deconstruction of (predominantly Freudian and Lacanian) psychoanalytic
concepts. The proposed alternative and subversive ‘‘schizoanalysis’’ involves the
notion that mental conditions like schizophrenia are to a considerable extent
constructed within a psychiatric and psychoanalytic discourse that accommo-
dates capitalism.

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

For Deleuze and Guattari (2009), Freudian psychoanalysis with its ‘‘analytic
imperialism of the Oedipus complex’’ (p. 23) is complicit with capitalism and
stabilises its ideology precisely because Freud has become yet another
patriarchal authority figure. This point has also been elaborated on in a
different context by Stephen Frosh (2006) in his discussion of the place of
psychoanalysis in the social and cultural world of the 20th and 21st century,
who states that ‘‘psychoanalysis is built heavily around the structures of
authority, in which power comes not through the expression of an individual
talent […] but through the gradual accrual of status in an insular and
labyrinthine social network’’ (p. 6). As Frosh argues, Freud himself assumed the
status of a ‘‘father’’ who was building a ‘‘psychoanalytic empire’’ (p. 6), leading –
in his own terms – to a transference between himself and his students and
followers.
It is indeed the task of schizoanalysis to dismantle this patriarchal structure –
which, according to its proponents, is expressive of the totalising force of
capitalism – through a new and liberating form of psychiatry that refuses to
reduce its patients to Oedipal structures. The schizophrenic is for Deleuze and
Guattari the paradigmatic figure of resistance against the alliance of psycho-
analysis and capitalism, since ‘‘Freud doesn’t like schizophrenics. He doesn’t like
their resistance to being oedipalized […]. They are apathetic, narcissistic, cut off
from reality, incapable of achieving transference; they resemble philosophers –
‘an undesirable resemblance’’’ (p. 23). The schizophrenic is problematic for a
typical Freudian analysis because he resists the individualising tendencies that
are primarily formed on the basis of the patient’s family history.
Since contemporary Western culture is already fundamentally shaped by an
epistemology based on Freudian theories, patients always already expect to be
reduced to their Oedipal complexes. The ‘‘artificial territorialities of our
society’’, and hence of capitalism, are projected onto the figure of the
psychoanalyst and elicit a reflexive response by the patient who already expects
no deeper insight from the analysis: ‘‘yes, my boss is my father, and so is the
Chief of State, and so are you, Doctor’’ (p. 35). The analyst thereby becomes
another father figure, which is consequently another implementation of state
authority that isolates the patient from any deeper social interconnection.
In this, I would argue, lies the similarity with Fisher’s, Taylor’s and Berardi’s
critiques of capitalism and its treatment of mental conditions. What Fisher calls
the ‘‘privatisation’’ and ‘‘de-politicisation’’ of depression corresponds to Deleuze
and Guattari’s (2009) criticism of a reductive psychoanalysis. The latter expand
on the Lacanian tension between the Symbolic and the unsignifiable Real with
their concept of ‘‘capitalist representation’’ (p. 240). In their thinking,
representation is a system of signs and images that denies the existence of
difference and provides a set of norms. The politician is a paradigmatic figure of
capitalist representation, as is the Freudian analyst in the service of ideology.
Philosophers and artists, however, are oppositional figures who strive for the

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

new and set out to destroy representation. Here, schizoanalysis comes into play
as it ‘‘[devotes] itself with all its strength to the necessary destructions.
Destroying beliefs and representations, theatrical scenes’’ (p. 314).
For Deleuze and Guattari, although first and foremost a ‘‘negative or
destructive task’’ (p. 322), this is at the same time an ‘‘affirmative task’’ (p. 334),
which helps to overcome representation. Capitalism – as a monetary and
material organisation, but most importantly as a representational system – rests
on a specific semiotic economy that assumes a hegemonic position in the
interpretation and decoding of signs: ‘‘Civilization is defined by the decoding
and the deterritorialization of flows in capitalist production’’ (p. 244).
Consequently, the ‘‘flow’’ of signs is interrupted by universalising interpretations
(or decodings), which finally leads to a process of abstraction between signifier
and signified. This includes the ‘‘abstraction of monetary quantities, but also the
abstraction of the quantity of labor; the limitless relationship between capital
and labor capacity’’, and, ultimately, the interruption of flows – a process that
produces ‘‘schizos’’ (p. 245). Here, psychoanalysis takes its place in the capitalist
representational system because it is part of the decoding machine:

Our societies exhibit a marked taste for all codes […] but this taste is
destructive and morbid. While decoding doubtless means understanding
and translating a code, it also means destroying the code as such, assigning
it an archaic, folkloric, or residual function, which makes of psychoanal-
ysis and ethnology two disciplines highly regarded in our modern societies.
(p. 245)

The notion of ‘‘schizophrenic flows’’ is crucial to the understanding of capitalist

decoding because it represents ‘‘flows of desire’’ that are interrupted by decoding
processes – and this is the point where, according to Deleuze and Guattari,
schizophrenia assumes the quality of an illness in the artificial and violent
interruption of its desires. After all, the schizo-flows are a result of the capitalist
condition:

Everywhere capitalism sets in motion schizo-flows that animate ‘our’ arts

and ‘our’ sciences, just as they congeal into the production of ‘our own’
sick, the schizophrenics. We have seen that the relationship of schizophre-
nia to capitalism went far beyond problems of modes of living,
environment, ideology, etc., and that it should be examined at the deepest
level of one and the same economy, one and the same production process.
Our society produces schizos the same way it produces Prell shampoo
or Ford cars, the only difference being that the schizos are not saleable.
(p. 245)

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

Here, however, Deleuze and Guattari encounter a paradox: despite producing

schizophrenics in the first place, ‘‘capitalist production is constantly arresting
the schizophrenic process and transforming the subject of the process into a
confined clinical entity, as though it saw in this process the image of its own
death coming from within’’, even though the schizophrenic should rather be
capitalism’s ‘‘own fulfilment’’ (p. 245). The psychiatric and psychoanalytic (in
its specifically Freudian form so detested by Deleuze and Guattari) apparatuses
are direct agents in the arresting of the schizophrenic process, because they limit
its flow through their hegemonic and ‘‘imperial’’ interpretations, and thereby
confine it to the territory defined by capital. Schizoanalysis, as a philosophy of
multiplicities, must intervene accordingly. Berardi (2009) summarises their
project thus:

This is what schizoanalysis does instead: it replaces interpretation with a

proliferation of escape plans and possible existential patterns; creative
proliferation replaces interpretative reductions. The process of the cure
cannot be understood (by familial psychoanalysis, or normalizing psycho-
analysis) as the reduction of deviant psyches to socially recognized
linguistic and psychological behavioural norms. […] This is the task of
schizoanalysis: to follow the delirium in order to make it coherent and
accessible to friendship both with the self and the other; to dissolve the
identity-fixed clots that harden the refrain; to link refrains and to reopen
the channels of communication between individual drifts and the cosmic
game. Therapy needs to be understood as a chaoid similar to art. (p. 137)

What is of central importance for a consideration of the Deleuzian-Guattarian

project from the perspective of cultural studies, then, is the fact that despite its
radically ‘‘anti-Freudian’’ (Grossberg, 2014, p. 7) tone, it is a project marked by
the attempt to free libidinal processes of desire from a universalising structure –
but not by overcoming psychoanalysis altogether. Rather, to return to the
epigraph of my article, if one follows Berardi’s interpretation, schizoanalysis
seems to take seriously the original aims of (Freudian) psychoanalysis by
considering therapy not as a solution to a problem that will subsequently
disappear, but as an ongoing, possibly infinite process that can produce equally
infinite multiplicities of meaning. It is therefore, as Berardi argues, a means of
overcoming the singular and universalising semiotisation of capitalism. Berardi
concludes The Soul at Work (2009) with an anecdote that recounts one of
Freud’s infamous rebuttals of the promise of salvation through psychoanalysis:
‘‘the young psychoanalyst Fliess asked when it is possible to consider a therapy
to be over and the patient be told, ‘you are ok.’ Freud answered that the
psychoanalysis has reached its goal when the person understands that therapy is
an interminable process. Autonomy is also a process without end’’ (p. 221). Or,

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

to put it differently, schizoanalysis is an alternative to normalising psychoanal-

ysis because it appreciates and affirms ‘‘the process of desire’’ or ‘‘desiring
production’’ ‘‘as creative, as productive of reality itself’’ (Grossberg, 2014, p. 7).
Schizoanalysis has in recent years been adapted for contemporary analyses of
neoliberal capitalism to come to terms with the widespread mental conditions
that have been associated with the current socio-political climate. I will
illustrate how writers like Fisher, Berardi and Taylor make use of Deleuzian-
Guattarian approaches to depression and anxiety – but I would like to do so
through the lens of some recent criticism that has been levelled at Deleuze and
Guattari’s notion of schizoanalysis. Schizoanalysis has mainly been met with
two major categories of criticism. The first takes issue with the unreflecting
appropriation of the Deleuzian-Guattarian approach without a sense of the
specific historical and cultural context of their writing. This criticism, primarily
aiming at a misconception of the ‘‘anti-psychiatric’’ stance of Anti-Oedipus, has
been poignantly summarised by Ian Parker (2007):

The ‘anti-psychiatry’ movement was a necessary response […]. However,

when anti-psychiatry became linked to the left it tended to romanticise
‘madness’ as the ‘other’ of, as alternative to, rationality under capitalism.
It then served to relay romantic ideas about essential underlying
psychological truths into the left. Even now the appeals to ‘anti-Oedipus’
and ‘schizoanalysis’ often serve to reproduce rather than challenge the
power of psychological categories among leftist academics. (pp. 177–178)

A consideration of mental illness in relation to capitalism must be careful not to

reproduce this ‘‘romanticisation’’ of the mentally ill as agents of cultural and
political resistance. At the same time, mental illnesses should not be reduced to
mere ‘‘constructions’’. Deconstructing the way mental illness (or certain types of
it) is being narrated by psychology and psychoanalysis does not mean denying
the existence or severity of the symptoms of those who suffer – rather, it means
to intervene in those discourses that use these illnesses as barometers of what
counts as normal or abnormal.
The second point of criticism concerns Deleuze and Guattari’s argument that
schizo-flows are an inherent feature of capitalism and its accelerating tenden-
cies, which have to be set free – in other words, in order to overcome the
destructive tendencies of capitalism, one has to fight fire with fire, and
consequently, to beat capitalism at its own game by allowing its own libidinal
accelerating tendencies to go into overdrive. The ‘‘schizo’’ ‘‘deliberately seeks
out the very limits of capitalism: he is its inherent tendency brought to
fulfilment, its surplus product, its proletariat, and its exterminating angel’’
(Deleuze and Guattari, 2009, p. 35). This affirmation of capitalism’s tendencies,
with the suggestion that the ultimate task is to overcome capitalism by

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

accelerating its processes, has recently been criticised by Benjamin Noys (2014)
as ‘‘Deleuzian Thatcherism’’ (p. 11). Noys (2012) further argues that what he
calls the ‘‘ultra-leftist’’ French philosophers of the 1970s fail to provide an actual
programme for political action. This criticism is, among others, explicitly
concerned with the Deleuzian-Guattarian notion of the ‘‘schizo’’:

While the accelerationists maintain a figure of revolution or revolt traced

along existing tendencies of capitalism, they became increasingly detached
from any actual social or political agency that could actuate this politics.
Where are the schizophrenics? What exactly would be the subject of
Lyotard’s libidinal band? How can the ‘dead’ or symbolic exchange
produce resistance? In the retreat of political experimentation during the
1970s the potential subject of this politics […] disappears. (p. 7)

Indeed, the current crisis in Britain’s mental health treatment and the rise in
depression as consequences of increasing unemployment rates and austerity
measures indicate that Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘schizo’’, the paradigmatic
figure of acceleration, has run its course as a model for thinking and figuring
capitalism in psychoanalytic terms. Rather, current phenomena suggest we go in
the opposite direction, that is, toward the reversal of affirmation and
acceleration.
As J. Halberstam (2011) remarks in her study on cultural figurations of
failure, ‘‘failure […] goes hand in hand with capitalism’’ (p. 88). Acknowledging
failure in a meritocratic capitalist society offers ‘‘alternative ways of knowing
and being’’ (p. 24). Figuring failure as an alternative epistemological and
ontological project can be connected to Noys’ (2012) extrapolation of ‘‘‘the
destructive side’’’ and ‘‘the forms of agency that might condense […] negativity
as a point of intervention’’ (p. 4). This ‘‘negative’’ intervention, however, is an
‘‘alternative which defines itself not simply as a mode of misery’’ (Noys, 2014,
p. 101). Rather, as Noys suggests, ‘‘[s]tarting from misery might instead involve
developing forms of politicization that could not only recognize misery but
delink from what causes us misery’’ (p. 103). This notion of what I would label
an epistemology of the negative resonates with recent attempts to come to terms
with depression and anxiety from a Deleuzian-Guattarian perspective.

Conclusion: Schizoanalysis, Depression: And Cultural Studies

Fisher (2009) explicitly alludes to the aims of Deleuzian-Guattarian schizo-

analysis when he demands the conversion of mental health problems ‘‘from
medicalized conditions into effective antagonisms’’ and calls for a restoration of
libidinal potentials through an ‘‘ascesis’’ that reverses the capitalist imperative
towards unconditional growth (p. 80). He thus suggests taking up the premise

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

of schizoanalysis, albeit with a twist. The same can be said for Berardi’s
dissection of depression in The Soul at Work. Berardi (2009) acknowledges that
Deleuze and Guattari hardly ever speak of depression, but he nevertheless
interprets their later work on chaos, after the Capitalism and Schizophrenia
series, in terms of depression. He considers their definition of chaos – ‘‘the
acceleration of the semiosphere and the thickening of the info-crust’’ and of ‘‘the
surrounding world of signs, symbols and info-stimulation’’ that is ‘‘producing
panic’’ – as the precondition for depression, which, as he argues, ‘‘is the
deactivation of desire after a panicked acceleration’’ (p. 214). Hence, Berardi
goes on to claim, in a way that clearly resonates with Noys’ and Halberstam’s
epistemology of the negative, that ‘‘[w]e should not see depression as a mere
pathology, but also as a form of knowledge. […] Suffering, imperfection,
senility, decomposition: this is the truth that you can see from a depressive point
of view’’ (p. 215). Depression thus becomes fathomable as a form of knowledge,
‘‘a political reclamation of negativity’’ that overcomes the ‘‘reactionary response
which is the positive, the idiot plaster of affirmation’’ (Taylor, 2013, p. 87).
According to this argument, neoliberalism is, in its meritocratic individual-
isation and fragmentation of society, a semiotic system in which the achieve-
ment of personal happiness and what Berlant (2011) has called the ‘‘fantasmatic
infrastructure of the good life’’ (p. 60) constitute the primary libidinal drive.
Hence, the negative (and most importantly its critical and productive compo-
nents) is shut out of the neoliberal semiosphere. Taylor insists on the distinction
between negativity as a progressive force and pessimism, which, according to his
argument, is the opposite (quite in line with Berlant’s (2011) notion of ‘‘cruel
optimism’’) – an affective position constituted by the growing awareness of
one’s precarious position in society which, in the light of the crumbling fantasy
of the ‘‘good life’’, precipitates feelings of isolation, emotional exhaustion and,
consequently, depression (p. 2). Throughout her book, Berlant argues for forms
of solidarity and collectivity that overcome this damaging isolation in the face of
the shared threat of precarity. This new form of ‘‘embracing’’ negativity and
abandoning the fantasy of the good life or unfounded optimism would thus lead
to new forms of radical democracy. Thus, what remains rather abstract and
meta-theoretical in Noys’ reflections becomes a more concrete political project
in Berlant’s and, ultimately, Taylor’s (2013) writings: ‘‘The task of a negative
social democratic revolt is to demonstrate how history is transformed through
spontaneous and devious eruptions of life’’ (p. 88). Instead of the ‘‘aloof and
impotent individual’’ succumbing to ‘‘cynicism and melancholia’’, it is time to
‘‘venture into the dark pleasure of the negative, the powerful and pulsating
substance of life, […] which might be moulded into a new democratic body’’
(p. 88).
The notion of an affective revolt that will culminate in the formation of new
collectivities is also at the heart of Berardi’s (2009) call for a ‘‘therapeutic
intervention’’ as ‘‘political action’’, one which ‘‘needs to be conceived first of all

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

as a shift in the social investments of desire’’ (pp. 139–140). Consequently, a

schizoanalytic intervention into the patterns of depression and anxiety caused
by the ‘‘semiocapitalistic universe’’ implies

the deterritorialization of the obsessive refrain, the re-focalization and

change of the landscape of desire, but also the creation of a new
constellation of shared beliefs, the common perception of a new
psychological environment and the construction of a new model of
relationship. […]. In the current situation, the schizoanalytic method
should be applied as political therapy: the Bipolar Economy is falling into
a deep depression. What happened during the first decade of the century
can be described in psychopathological terms, in terms of panic and
depression. (p. 217)

If conceived this way, then, schizoanalysis can become important for a cultural
studies informed by psychoanalytic theories and methods. If we bear in mind the
potential pitfalls (outlined in the two objections directed at a Deleuzian-
Guattarian affirmationism) of the ideas presented in Anti-Oedipus and
subsequent interpretations thereof, we find that the concept of schizoanalysis
can firstly serve as a corrective set of ideas allowing for a critical and productive
re-reading (or a meta-observation) of psychoanalytic approaches in the field of
cultural studies. Provided that Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas are not uncritically
elevated to a new dogma, they can help prevent psychoanalytic theory from
becoming a ready made and universalising school of thought. Secondly, and
perhaps more practically, within the methodological toolkit of cultural studies
(and one does not necessarily have to subscribe to the radical measures
proposed by Taylor or Berardi here), the notions subsumed under schizoanalysis
can, coupled with a re-framing of ‘‘negativity’’, provide us with the terminology
and the epistemological frames to come to terms with the intricate and
sometimes paradoxical connections of capitalism (or neoliberalism), mental
illness and psychiatric and psychoanalytic apparatuses.
With respect to the ‘‘mental health plague’’ said to be haunting contemporary
austerity Britain, a cultural studies methodology attuned to these notions offers
a path through the intricate web of discourses that informs the ways in which
mental illness and its connection to a neoliberal society are being conceived. It
offers a possibility to examine how the language of crisis in reaction to
neoliberalism’s effect on mental health frames and figures those affected by it.
Here, a psychoanalytically informed stance offers perspectives on the relation
between the psyche of the individual and the social collective that is evoked in
such statements as those that speak of the ‘‘emotional state of the nation.’’ How
can ‘‘the nation’’ be emotionally affected and what seems to be gained by the
recourse to such figures of speech? Considering the widespread sense of
neoliberalism as an all-encompassing ideological form, economic principle and

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

way of life, how can we critically dissect the symbolic, emotional and material
components of the ‘‘intimidatory regime’’ of neoliberal austerity measures? The
concept of schizoanalysis offers ways to challenge common semiotisations that
go along with these kinds of regimes and at the same time offer ways to re-assess
what a society and its members consider desirable in terms of mental health,
economics and ways of life. This, as I have outlined, also conforms to a re-
evaluation of what it means to live a ‘‘good life’’ and to pursue fantasies of
happiness.
In addition, with respect to the theoretical design of a cultural studies
approach that intends to study the intersections of psychological aspects of a
culture under capitalism, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘‘negative’’ schizoanalytic
approach bears the potential of a meta-discourse. I conceive of this meta-
discourse, in the terms proposed by Ian Buchanan (2008) in his reading of Anti-
Oedipus, as animated by a ‘‘dialectical reversal’’ (p. 78). According to
Buchanan, this dialectical reversal is embodied in the Oedipus complex ‘‘which
for psychoanalysis is the solution to the problem of how desire functions’’ – a
solution that Deleuze and Guattari in turn transform ‘‘into a problem all over
again by asking how and under what conditions we came to think of ourselves
as Oedipalized’’ (p. 78). This dialectical reversal, in the terminology developed
by Deleuze and Guattari, can be described as a continuous deterritorialisation,
or, within the ‘‘negative’’ task of schizoanalysis, a ‘‘necessary destruction’’. The
task is to maintain a sense of multiplicity, and, in addition, a critical stance that
avoids falling into the traps outlined by Samo Tomšič – that is, criticising and
dissecting the intersections of capitalism and its effects by falling prey to its
representational systems.
In conclusion, I would like to take up Lawrence Grossberg’s (2014) recent
‘‘polemic’’ on the possibilities of productively negotiating between cultural
studies and the work of Deleuze and Guattari. Conceiving of cultural studies as
‘‘a conjuncturally specific pragmatic assemblage’’ that defies ‘‘the desire for
theoretical or political purity’’ (p. 20, fn. 1), Grossberg emphasises the
significant contribution that a Deleuzian-Guattarian perspective can make to
the field of cultural studies. The strength of Deleuze and Guattari lies precisely
in their philosophy’s ‘‘anti-universalist’’ awareness of ‘‘multiplicities’’: ‘‘they
demand that we think multiplicities – everywhere, wherever we think there are
singularities or binaries, we need to think multiplicities – not merely as
accumulations or sets of singularities, but as a multiplicity of forms of
organization as well’’ (p. 19). In addition, Grossberg credits Deleuze and
Guattari with providing the tools to use theoretical concepts ‘‘in conversation
with the demands of the material realities of the actual’’ – that is, they offer ways
to consider the multiplicities and structures that constitute the ‘‘realities of social
existence’’ (p. 19). Using the example of competing theories about capitalism
and their effects on social realities, Grossberg calls for a reconstruction of the

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

Schmitt

‘‘relations among the multiplicity of processes of power, sorting out not just the
old and new, but also, how the old becomes new’’ (p. 19).
Applied to the field of psychoanalytic cultural studies and the example of
mental illness under capitalism, this can be achieved not only by trying to come to
terms with a given cultural phenomenon by means of psychoanalytic theory, but
by showing how the discourse of psychoanalysis can be complicit with the
hegemonic forms that we try to describe by its means. Rather than just dismissing
a theory for its potential alignment with power and dominant discourse, a
Deleuzian-Guattarian approach can thus help to uncover the multiplicities of
such interconnections and make them work to galvanise cultural studies.

Notes

1 The claims about the effects of austerity measures and the overall social climate after the 2008
financial crisis have been backed by several recent studies. Mattheys et al (2016), for instance, offer
a comprehensive cohort study of mental health in Stockton-on-Tees, England to assess the
development of mental health within different social strata after the implementation of austerity
measures by the Coalition government in 2010. They conclude that there ‘‘is significant social and
health inequality in Stockton’’, with ‘‘material and psychosocial factors’’ being the ‘‘most important
determinants of the gap’’ in ‘‘mental health and wellbeing between the most and least deprived areas
of Stockton-on-Tees in a time of austerity’’ (p. 358). See also Whitehead et al (2015) for a
comprehensive discussion of trends in mental health inequalities during the post-2008 recession,
and Stuckler and Basu (2013) for a discussion of these issues on a global scale.
2 Tomšič (2015) singles out Reich and Marcuse as particular exponents of ‘‘Freudo-Marxism’’ who
have fallen into this trap, due to their primary focus on the repression of sexuality in capitalist culture
and their conclusion that a freed sexuality will counter capitalism’s normalising tendencies (p. 8).

About the Author

Mark Schmitt is a postdoctoral Stuart Hall Fellow and instructor in British

Cultural Studies at TU Dortmund University, Germany. He completed his
doctoral degree at Ruhr-University Bochum with the study ‘British white trash:
Figurations of tainted whiteness in the novels of Irvine Welsh, Niall Griffiths
and John King’ (to be published with Transcript in 2018). His research focuses
on social abjection, the intersections of race and class and their cultural
figurations, contemporary British and Irish literature, theories of British
Cultural Studies and film studies.

References

Berardi, F. (2009) The Soul at Work. From Alienation to Autonomy. South Pasadena:
Semiotexte(s).
Berlant, L. (2011) Cruel Optimism. Durham/London: Duke University Press.

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society

 Dysfunctional capitalism

Buchanan, I. (2008) Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. London/New York:

Continuum.
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2009) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
Translated by R. Hurley. London: Penguin Classics.
Fisher, M. (2009) Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative?. Winchester: Zero Books.
Fisher, M. (2014) Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost
Futures. Winchester: Zero Books.
Frosh, S. (2006) For and Against Psychoanalysis. London/New York: Routledge.
Grossberg, L. (2014) Cultural studies and Deleuze-Guattari, part 1: A polemic on projects
and possibilities. Cultural Studies 28(1): 1–28.
Halberstam, J. (2011) The Queer Art of Failure. Durham/London: Duke University Press.
Mattheys, K., Bambra, C., Warren, J., Kasim, A. and Akhter, N. (2016) Inequalities in
mental health and wellbeing in a time of austerity. Baseline findings from the Stockton-
on-Tees cohort study. SSM – Population Health 2: 350–359.
Newman, J. and Clarke, J. (2013) States of imagination. In: S. Hall, D. Massey and M.
Rustin (eds) After Neoliberalism. The Kilburn Manifesto. London: Soundings, p. 99.
Noys, B. (2012) The Persistence of the Negative. A Critique of Contemporary Continental
Theory. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Noys, B. (2014) Malign Velocities. Accelerationism and Capitalism. Winchester: Zero
Books.
Parker, I. (2007) Revolution in Psychology. Alienation to Emancipation. London/Ann
Arbor: Pluto Press.
Roberts, R. (2015) Psychology and Capitalism. The Manipulation of Mind. Winchester:
Zero Books.
Stuckler, D. and Basu, S. (2013) The Body Economic. Why Austerity Kills – Recessions,
Budget Battles, and the Politics of Life and Death. New York: HarperCollins.
Taylor, J.D. (2013) Negative Capitalism. Cynicism in the Neoliberal Era. Winchester: Zero
Books.
The Guardian (2015) Austerity and a malign benefits regime are profoundly damaging
mental health (Open letter), 17 Aprilhttps://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/apr/17/
austerity-and-a-malign-benefits-regime-are-profoundly-damaging-mental-health, acces-
sed 5 April 2017.
Tomšič, S. (2015) The Capitalist Unconscious. Marx and Lacan. London/New York:
Verso.
Walker, C. (2008) Depression and Globalization. The Politics of Mental Health in the 21st
Century. New York: Springer.
Whitehead, M., Barr, B. and Kindermann, P. (2015) Trends in mental health inequalities in
England during a period of recession, austerity and welfare reform 2004 to 2013. Social
Science and Medicine 147: 324–331.

 2017 Macmillan Publishers Ltd. 1088-0763 Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society