Obsessive ecologies

SHREYA VAISH

‘Production for the sake of production – the obsession with the rate of growth, whether in the capitalist market or in planned economies – leads to monstrous absurdities. The only acceptable finality of human activity is the production of a subjectivity that is auto-enriching its relation to the world in a continuous fashion.’

– Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm

TODAY, Guattari and Bateson’s mental ecology1 is typified and populated by
the hyper-rational and managerialist bracketing of existential territories, and the stilted subjectivities that congeal as by-products of this bracketing movement. Several years have elapsed since Guattari first published The Three Ecologies,2 and yet he accurately anticipated the contemporary psychologisation of the mental ecology, its pulverisation into zones of auto-optimisation and voluntary servitude.

Capitalism, having morphed into the aggressively decentralised and cybernetic Integrated World Capitalism (IWC)3, is transforming the ecologies into its pale and hollow imitations. New aspects of this dystopia – the pandemic, cognitive-behavioural psychotherapy, and the aggressive medicalisation of distress – are rendering old oppositions obsolete while installing new barriers in the path of radical subjectivations. This essay tracks the mental ecology through its obsessive neurotic evolution, attempting to understand how it finds itself today in the pharmacological stupor of hospital gowns and half-formed thoughts.

Diagram: A Cartograph of the Obsessive Ecology.

As Sadie Plant4 writes, ‘we live in a culture of compulsive counting, a society so obsessed with figures that if it were an individual, it would be seeing a psychiatrist.’ Counting and recounting the undulations of the stock market, worldwide Covid-19 cases, proliferating cryptocurrencies, footsteps indicated by fitness watches, calories in my food – all this common-place restlessness resembles obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD),5 especially as a type of social structure.

The American Psychiatric Association’s (APA’s) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, fifth edition (DSM-5)6 defines OCD as a psychological and behavioural pathology characterised by the presence of obsessions and/or compulsions that cause marked impairments in the patient’s functioning in multiple domains, producing clinically significant distress. The World Health Organisation’s (WHO’s) International Classification of Diseases, tenth version (ICD-10)7 also defines OCD along similar lines, differing from its American counterpart only in the presentation of clinical features8 and the classification of OCD as an anxiety disorder9 alongside other forms of neurosis (excluding depression). However, the ICD-10’s OCD is not the focus of this essay; for the purpose of her critique,10 she will home in on the clinical criteria for OCD in DSM-5 and Freudo-Lacanian psychoanalysis.

In its distinctively dry and atheoretical nosology, the DSM-5 identifies obsessions as ‘[r]ecurrent and persistent thoughts, urges, or images that are experienced, at some time during the disturbance, as intrusive and unwanted […].’11 The manual conveys how the patient, tormented by these obsessions, produces mental and behavioural patterns to counteract them. Having sanitised the mental ecology of desire and the uncon-scious, the DSM-5 suspends lived experience to one or more of its 297 disorders and sub-disorders.12 In 2019, it branded over 970 million people worldwide with such diagnoses,13 establishing its complicity in the med-icalisation of distress.

To return to OCD, obsessions are underlying thoughts, images, or urges that drive compulsions. The patient with OCD is compelled to enact compulsions through pre-established, rigid, and repetitive sequences of behaviour or ideation.14 Movements like pacing, chanting under one’s breath, arranging and rearranging one’s belongings, etc. become compulsions when they take on an all-consuming and uncontrollable quality. Owing to their neutralising function,15 compulsions are usually unrelated to the object(s) of obsession, and the patient comes to rely more and more on them after their initial success in staving off obsessions. In other words, compulsions are sanitary and deodorising.

What causes OCD, or, in clinical language, what is its aetiology? The bio-psycho-social model and similar approaches cannot explain it; such etiologies claim novelty while presupposing the same hyper-rational and managerial conjecture. There is nothing ethical or aesthetic about the inoffensive mishmash of therapeutic models and techniques that is passed off as ‘evidence-based’ eclecticism in clinical practice. In spite of the stupidity of their discipline, clinical psychologists are slowly coming to terms with the false singularity of their sacred models.16 Whether one practices CBT, psychoanalysis, or a combination of the two has little effect on therapeutic outcomes, the implication being that pseudo-eclecticism is as good as dogmatic foreclosure. This bitter revelation is as significant as the replication crisis17 that plagued clinical psychology in the 2010s, and still has damning implications for the field. Anticipating the falsity of the clinician’s benevolence, the Situationist International made a rare but much-needed observation when they equated mental health centres to police stations, those ‘vanguard agencies of modern oppression’,18 though this equation would still hold if ‘counselling centres at universities’ were swapped with ‘psychiatric clinics anywhere.’

To depart from narrow clinical definitions, obsessions and compulsions not only jam up the flows of production that course through the socius, 19 but they also give consistency to the social surface as its guiding axiomatic. By fixating on the anti-productive and excessive rituals that characterise patients with OCD, clinicians fail to see how their practice is embedded in the larger obsessive neurosis of IWC. Here, the ritualistic back-and-forth movement in obsessive neurosis takes on an asubjective hue, and the free market sutures the capitalist socius in the same way it consolidates the narrative of Don DeLillo’s White Noise.20

The supermarket dominates White Noise, becoming a spiritual abode for Jack Gladys (the narrator), his family, and other faceless shoppers. Inspiring both familiarity and awe, the market dissolves subjectivities in lineal rituals of selecting products, scanning them at the counter, and exchanging money for receipts. Dizzying quantities of consumer brands, data flashing in tabloids, catchy product jingles, and the oversaturated colours of the (super)market are stuffed into the cracks in the three ecologies, the same cracks caused by the extractive and exploitative policies21 that enable capitalists to generate consumer products.

In the course of these lineal rituals or serial disjunctions, simplified and commodified subjectivities merge with the organic and inorganic inhabitants of other ecologies, emerging as statis-tical data points. The capitalist socius expresses its obsession with management and rationality through this metric language, organising and reorganising data points according to increasingly obtuse and arbitrary principles.22

Contemporary IWC-infested mental ecology contains neither the social nor the individual; the former disintegrates into a Hobbesian mass of discrete individuals while the latter is pulverised into flashes of neuronal energy and the afterimages of fascist fantasies. Freed of the biopolitical structures that defined disciplinary societies, the individual (the capitalist subject) continually encounters the memory of their excesses as the only coherent point of reference against which he charts his movement. Capitalist desire invests in this obsessive disassembly, causing a highly segmented and simplified unconscious to congeal alongside the capitalist subject, with the organs of allegiance and dissent already attached to individual bodies.

IWC self-selects across the mental ecology, stealing and reorganising certain legs and fingers, nightly dreams, lobes of the brain, and other materials into a transversal pattern that strengthens the allegiance of present and future subjectivities. Caught in this torrent, capitalist subjects express their allegiance to the prevailing order against their own subjectivity and class interests.23

For others who dissent volun-tarily or involuntarily, the capitalist socius descends upon them, dismissing the distress it produces as the subject’s failure to cope,24 her social-occupational dysfunction,25 or tragic genetic predispositions.26 In the miraculous event an alterity escapes the control mechanisms that have come to define the three ecologies, the capitalist socius ensures its quiet death in the psychotherapist’s office.

For Aaron Beck, the founder of CBT, all negative perceptions of the world are rooted in cognitive distortions.27 Not only does CBT enjoy the near-unanimous support28 of psychologists and psychiatrists, whose bread and butter depends on the peddling of the mental health industrial complex, but insurance companies, policy planners, and educators also privilege it over structural intervention.

The marketplace of psychotherapies has grown to include hundreds of treatment alternatives with new practitioners and treatment packages being approved by accrediting bodies across the globe. Given this rapid expansion,29 the skyrocketing rates of addictions30 and suicides31 among young people cannot be attributed to the lack or absence of psychotherapeutic options. One wonders whether negligence, incompetence, or a tacit complicity with the prevailing order mars the noble mission of allaying global psychomorbidity. In the words of Hillman and Ventura’s impishly serious book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World’s Getting Worse.32

To reiterate, the capitalist socius is as asocial as it is anti-individual. The recent coronavirus pandemic merely exposed and accelerated the obsessive neurotic asociality inherent in the capitalist socius. Earlier on, the bodies of minorities were unsanitary, but now anybody can become the harbinger of disease and death. Many obsessive neurotics harbour contamination fears and sanitary compulsions33 which are meant to preserve the neurotic against an antagonistic other which cannot coincide with my body.

At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the TV flashed images of damaged lung tissue,34 faces rotting with mucormycosis,35 and the mass cremation of coronavirus casualties,36 one could not help but look away, forming series of little obsessive neurotic disjunctions to cancel the scopic obscenity37 of the capitalist socius.

This asociality, evinced by the international immiseration of the mental ecology, constitutes the necro-productive link between killing and dying. As a character in White Noise observes, the solution to Gladys’s obsession with death is murder: to let another die is to forget the Real of one’s own death, securing temporary immortality. The capitalist socius invests this desire of the other’s death in the new theology of the market and the economy, disseminating obsessive neurosis across multiple ecologies.

Through reciprocal reinforcement, obsessive neurosis becomes prevalent to the point that it ceases to be a pathology. Spilling out of the mental ecology, it expands and mutates into obsessive ecology, infecting diverse ecologies like the Covid-19 virus. The obsessive ecology proliferates by apparent self-negation; insinuating itself as a familiar entity, each obsessive-compulsive iteration becomes the foundation for another, before becoming neutral or asymptomatic.

To maintain this trajectory, the obsessive ecology continually disinfects the mental ecology of its past, erasing the archive of its barbarism from collective memory. Yet such sanitary attempts are doomed to repetition for they reproduce the very disjunctions they are meant to annul. This reality of obsessive neurosis as structure and crisis, a significant paradoxical quality, is completely precluded by the church of clinical psychology, its neoliberal priests and bibles.

A comprehensive understanding of obsessive-compulsive phenomena necessitates a detour through Freudo-Lacanian nosology. Freud’s views on obsessive neurosis – one of his favourite psychopathologies38 – can be traced back to his encounter with the Rat Man, a patient who shared the psychoanalyst’s anal character.39 The young patient was irrationally fixated on the autoeroticism of the anal stage, and his very career (law) was symptomatic40 of the desire to exorcise the obsessions that plagued him.

An army of rats, suicidal imagery, and other fears tormented the Rat Man, becoming the basis for his painful isolation and consequent obsessive neurotic homosexuality.41 In this way, psychoanalysis breaks with the identitarian definition of homosexuality which presupposes the presence of a same-sex other. Obsessive homosexuality lacks this other,42 its narcissistic preoccupation with itself causes it to desire the other’s death.

For Freud, the Rat Man’s dead father and overbearing mother were responsible for cementing their child’s infantile sexuality and his obsessive neurotic character. Lacan’s interpretation builds on Freud’s Oedipalisation: the obsessive neurotic searches for his missing Father43 in the quest to identify with the enigmatic object of his Mother’s desire. This ambiguity of a slave in search of his master constitutes obsessional subjectivity as an existential subjunctive. Paralysed by the Hamletian injunction ‘to be or not to be,’ the obsessive neurotic wavers between identifying with the Father and being his subordinate.

This uncertainty or the subjunctive is endemic to capitalism – the capitalist subject and the obsessive neurotic coalesce, shuffling back and forth between the subject-status of the corporate bureaucrat whose power secures them a nonreciprocal relation with subordinates and the object’s fate of continual displacement spurred by free market transactions.

The exchange between the Rat Man and Freud was anything but innocuous or neutral; presupposing an obsolete metaphysics of individualism, the psychotherapist’s office replaces the priest’s confession box44 and masks its theological genealogy by adopting a depoliticised and scientistic language.45 Assuming the clinical definition of abnormality – the violation of social expectations and deviation from statistical norms46 – the psychotherapeutic ‘cure’ begins with the pathologisation of nonconforming existential territories.

Through these ‘cures’ the socius locates its own pathologies in the subject, and summons the Fatherly psychotherapist to haul back escapees into the prison of obsessive neurotic subjectivity. When the Father’s medicine – CBT, clomipramine, transcranial magnetic stimulation – fails to produce well-adapted and docile subjects, the Father’s stunted and stigmatised children become undeserving of his benevolence, and the machinic and asignifying vitality immanent to their symptoms is written off as inferior and wasteful.

Is it possible to theorise obsessive neurosis without falling back on the quasi-theological drama of Mummy and Daddy? All Lacanians know that psychotic desire47 is not symbolised, that it escapes Oedipal triangulation. As Deleuze and Guattari note in Anti-Oedipus,48 psychotic egress holds in it the potential to trigger other lines of flight. This essay approaches the obsessive neurotic as a psychotic child, stuffing his clinical picture with her own coordinates till it implodes. Below are some obscene self-references,disfigurements, and hyperchromatisms with which this essay redraws the anal obsessional neurotic. Needless to say, she assumes the starting point of foreclosure.

As the progeny of catatonia,49 obsessive neurosis shares many differences and similarities with its ancestor. It is distinct from the absolute disjunction of catatonia, where an uncommunicative void opens up between the objects implicated in this relation. Obsessive neurosis inherits and reconfigures this arboreal or dichotomising axiomatic by creating the shallow and lineal divisions and linkages of serial disjunction. The obsessive neurotic shields herself against the deeper disjunction of the machinic and asignifying real by substituting it with this serial disjunction. Obsessional subjectivation links production to preservation, and the complex and varying rituals it produces reproduce the atomised capitalist subject in a sea of egosyntonic little others.

For example, the obsessive-capitalist subjectivity marked off by this ‘I’ worries that the skewed muscle to fat ratio of her body will develop into obesity and early death. A partial object – the image of a blocked artery, anxiolytic medical reports, the beeping electroen-cephalogram – stubbornly lodges itself between the connective and conjunctive syntheses, threatening the integrity of the triangulated structures of the nation-state, family, etc. and my investment in them. Death, sharing an exclusionary-disjunctive relation with life, haunts and terrifies me to the point that I spend considerable time and energy on consuming health supplements, counting my steps to the gym and back, and using the weighing machine again and again.

The obsessional attempts to ward off, annul, or expel the impinging partial object by overcoding it with compulsions that manifest as serial disjunctions. This serial-disjunctive hostility towards the other as anything which is not-me, not-here, and not-now overwrites the strong negativity of machinic disjunction. This is the common factor between obsessive neurosis and paranoia: the former primarily employs serial disjunction, while the latter wields exclusionary disjunction against her enemy, and both lose the machinic disjunction to foreclosure in the ensuing kerfuffle.

What do the obsessive neurotic and paranoiac want? They desire the absolute disjunction of catatonia, that state of zero intensity which dwarfs death itself.

In spite of all its compulsive cleanliness, hygiene, and negentropy, obsessive neurosis is obsessed with death. The spatio-temporal sterility it engenders (all hail catatonia) is the paralytic effect50 of the subjunctive: the obsessional neurotic, caught in a serial-disjunctive relation with the ecologies he occupies, can only mark time, shuffle back and forth, and clean his bedroom in a general pedantism that cancels the future and anchors him to one familiar, worn out spot.

This living death forms the basis of the homicidal expression of obsessive neurosis of which Hamlet is an exemplary example. Death occupies the other side of Hamlet’s dilemma – ‘not to be’ captures the subjunctive’s potential for fascist destruction,51 marking it as indissociable from obsessional neurosis. In Hamlet, the Prince’s frantic efforts to find closure after King Hamlet’s death, his dogged search for the Father, lead to the needless deaths of Polonius, Rosencrantz, Ophelia, and others.52

Just like the Father who haunts Prince Hamlet, Roithamer rises from the grave of his incomplete manuscript to torment the narrator of Bernhard’s Correction.53 In Correction, the scientist Roithamer posthumously bequeaths the task of editing and publishing his biography to his colleague, the unnamed narrator of Correction. The latter becomes embroiled in Roithamer’s hyperrational drive to ‘correct’ everything to the point of nonexistence, an obsessive negation of negation54 that culminated in Roithamer’s suicide. Upon realising his predicament, the narrator attempts to thwart his own death by substituting negation for compulsive reorganisation. He sorts and sifts through the pages of the manuscript, vowing to not edit it, and yet he is unable to escape Roithamer’s obsessive neurosis by leaving Hoeller’s garret.

As Shuler55 remarks, ‘[a]n obsession inevitably reasserts itself and though it is in fact the “negative” component of the psyche, produces an inescapable attraction.’ Wedged between Hamlet and Roithamer, obsessive subjectification is marked off by an impasse: the obsessive neurotic cannot produce the new and is hostile to anything that does not share their inability.

The homosexual refrain is one response to Guattari’s call for new subjectivities included at the beginning of this essay. For Guattari, a system seeking to be ethico-aesthetically effective should be able to detect sites of rupture and generate autopoietic subjectivities through the production of refrains. The refrain,56 a rhythmic repetition forged in chaos, is the minimum consistency that allows for movement and transformation while avoiding catatonia and obsessive neurosis. The identitarian and psychoanalytical definitions of homosexuality discussed earlier are two instances of obsessive calcification as both pre-suppose an investment in either Oedipus or little capitalist egos.

Freud57 and Lacan58 are quick to note the strong egos that obsessive neurotics are endowed with – it is their rigidity or oblativity that allows them to continually reassert their compulsions. Investing desire in homosexual ego-identities would just reassert this obsessive normativity. The singularity of homosexual becomings lies in the unflinching disavowal of the completeness of the connective-conjunctive syntheses that, banishing disjunction, can only reproduce living death. The homosexual must continually disturb the obsessive neurotic’s carefully established sutures or else risk being locked into an exclusionary disjunctive relation with heterosexuality as its passive, exotic, and alien ‘other’.59

Only by employing the disjunctive synthesis in all its strength and flexibility, i.e., in its machinic form, the homosexual can hope to escape the exclusionary disjunctions of life-death and hetero-sexuality-homosexuality assumed in and imposed by the capitalist socius. Obsessive neurosis will not abdicate its privileged position easily, and so it requires not only homosexuals but also tulips, heterosexuals, mountains, transexuals, stars, children, and the sun to practise homosexuality as a type of nongenealogical and nonreproductive becoming.

The homosexual must also renounce her own obsessive investments in homosexuality by refusing the calcification of desire upon ego-identities, families, nation-states, and even nomadic relations. This agile non-allegiance is the necessary condition for mobilising a multiplicity of holes, transversal alliances, and irreducible ambiguities to puncture the obsessive neurotic screen of foreclosure.

Leaping beyond identity and irony, the homosexual refrain becomes an untranslatable pattern of subjectivation: by refusing the stability of allegiance, it can no longer be translated into the metric language of fiscal deposits, stock value, and monetary transactions. Given the recuperative speed of obsessive ecologies, it is vital to unceasingly destabilise the closed holism of the connective and conjunctive syntheses, freeing desire whenever possible from the straitjacket of the socius and its psychotherapeutic institutions. Homosexuals and other minorities intimately understand the social investment in death as their subjectivities are continually associated with it, making them uniquely capable of seeing and dismantling the world created by this investment.

The homosexual refrain must seize the serial and exclusionary disjunctions in obsessive neurosis and turn them into the asignifying vitality of the machinic disjunction, becoming a Sancho Panza to the desire that underwrites the structure. This newfound vitality, freed from its obsessive yoke, will wander and gallop across the borders of familiar and unfamiliar existential territories, producing its own equine cadence. Trailing these becomings, the homosexual refrain will exit the psychobabble of the family, university, and clinic, fusing with other militant subjectivities in a shared quixotic unfolding across multiple ecologies. Perhaps, looking back, these subjectivities will find a rhythm in their tracks and a shared harmony in each other’s machinic disjunctions, discovering in the ruins of the asylum music for a new earth.

Footnotes:

1. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind. University of Chicago Press, Chicago [U.A.], 2016.

2. Félix Guattari, The Three Ecologies. Bloomsbury Academic, London, 2014.

3. Ibid.

4. Sadie Plant, ‘1.1. Compelled to Count’, CCA Annex, 29 April 2021, cca-annex.net/entry/compelled-to-count/. Accessed 25 April 2023, p. 1.

5. American Psychiatric Association. Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. In Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

6. American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 5th ed., American Psychiatric Association, 2013.

7. World Health Organization, The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders. World Health Organization, 1993.

8. World Health Organization, F42 Obsessive-compulsive disorder. In The ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders. World Health Organization, 1993.

9. Ibid.

10. This essay assumes the voice of a young homosexual woman (indicating a people yet-to-come) who is distinct from the hysteric and the maternal body in psychoanalysis. She is also not the author; the latter has already disappeared in the pursuit of another elsewhere. This is a meta-textual experiment to unsettle the linguistic triangle of ‘I’, ‘you’, and ‘them’, the grammatical person assumed by the obsessive neurotic and scrambled by the psychotic.

11. American Psychiatric Association, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, p. 237.

12. Allen Frances, Saving Normal: An Insider’s Revolt against Out-of-Control Psychiatric Diagnosis, DSM-5, Big Pharma, and the Medicalization of Ordinary Life. William Morrow, 2014.

13. World Health Organization, ‘Mental Disorders’. Who.int, World Health Organization, 9 April 2018, www.who.int/en/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders.

14. American Psychiatric Association, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder.

15. Ibid.

16. Recent research suggests that the psy-chotherapist, the client, and their therapeutic alliance matter more than the clinician’s psychotherapeutic model. This has caused the development of a ‘common factors’ view that eschews old antagonisms between different traditions of psychotherapy. See Douglas H. Sprenkle and Adrian J. Blow, ‘Common Factors and Our Sacred Models’, Journal of Marital and Family Therapy 30(2), April 2004, pp. 113-29, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1752-0606.2004.tb01228.x.

17. Bradford J. Wiggins, and Cody D. Chriso-pherson, ‘The Replication Crisis in Psychology: An Overview for Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology’, Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology 39(4), November 2019, pp. 202-17, https://doi.org/10.1037/teo0000137. Accessed 10 March 2020.

18. Black & Red. Firm, and Vale Zines Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, On the Poverty of Student Life: A Consideration of Its Economic, Political, Sexual, Psychological and Notably Intellectual Aspects and of a Few Ways to Cure It. Black & Red, 1983, p. 8.

19. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. University of Minnesota Press, 1983.

20. Don Delillo, White Noise. Viking Press, 2018.

21. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

22. Ibid.

23. The psychoanalytic category of repression cannot explain why people continue to extend their support to a socius that crushes their personalities. As Lyotard infamously put it, ‘the English unemployed did not become workers to survive, they – hang on tight and spit on me – enjoyed the hysterical, masochistic, whatever exhaustion it was of hanging on in the mines, in the foundries, in the factories, in hell, they enjoyed it, enjoyed the mad destruction of their organic body which was indeed imposed upon them […]’ In Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy. Indiana University Press, 1993,
pp. 111.

24. Farhad Dalal, CBT: The Cognitive Behavioural Tsunami: Politics, Power, and the Corruptions of Science. Routledge, London, 2018.

25. Ibid.

26. Ibid.

27. It is no coincidence that African-Americans are more likely than others to qualify for schizophrenia. For CBT, negative feelings about institutionalised racism can only be the product of individual misperceptions or conditioned complexes. See Jonathan Metzl, The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease. Beacon, 2011.

28. Farhad Dalal, CBT.

29. Just like the capitalist socius, mainstream clinical psychology attempts to mask its decay by feigning reproduction as the production of the new. Brief psychoanalytic therapies and third-wave CBT’s orientalist appropriation of mindful-ness are two equally laughable symptoms of this defensive production.

30. Ashley Abramson, ‘Substance Use during the Pandemic’, American Psychological Association, 1 March 2021, www.apa.org/monitor/2021/03/substance-use-pandemic.

31. WHO, ‘Suicide’. Who.int, World Health Organization, WHO, 17 June 2021, www.who.int/news- room/fact-sheets/detail/suicide.

32. James Hillman and Michael Ventura, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy – and the World’s Getting Worse. Harper, San Francisco, 1992.

33. I.E. Perkes, et al. ‘Contamination Compulsions and Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder during COVID-19’, Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 54(11), September 2020, pp. 1137-38, https://doi.org/10.1177/0004867420952846.

34. Zarir F. Udwadia, et al. ‘Post-Covid Lung Fibrosis: The Tsunami that Will Follow the Earthquake’, Lung India: official organ of Indian Chest Society, vol. 38, Supplement (2021), S41-S47. doi:10.4103/lungindia.lungindia_818_20

35. Soutik Biswas, ‘Mucormycosis: The “Black Fungus” Maiming Covid Patients in India’, BBC News, 9 May 2021, www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-57027829.

36. CNN, Jessie Yeung, Clarissa Ward, Rishabh Pratap, and Scott McWhinnie, ‘As India’s Crematoriums Overflow with Covid Victims, Pyres Burn through the Night’, CNN, 1 May 2021, edition.cnn.com/2021/04/29/india/india-covid-deaths-crematoriums-intl-hnk-dst/index.html.

37. A virus, person, machine, or a work of art is obscene insofar it reveals the scene of mass cathexis.

38. Astrid Gessert, Obsessional Neurosis. Routledge, 2020.

39. The anal personality’s preoccupation with cleanliness, orderliness, and trustworthiness is a defence mechanism (reaction-formation) against her innate interest in unsanitary aspects of human experience. Such individuals compensate for their underlying desires and impulses by projecting an image of excessive control and discipline. See Dany Nobus, Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. Routledge EBooks, Informa, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429476402. Accessed 25 April 2023.

40. Sam Shuler, ‘“Carrion Crow”: The Rat Man and the Excesses of Modernity’, www.academia.edu, www.academia.edu/40000406/_Carrion_Crow_The_Rat_Man_
and_the_Excesses_of_Modernity. Accessed 25 April 2023.

41. Astrid Gessert, Obsessional Neurosis.

42. Ibid.

43. For Lacan, the Father is not a flesh-and-blood guardian or a biological parent. Rather, the concept denotes a fictional or real entity before whom the subject kneels in Oedipal adoration. The social order invests greatly
in this Father, turning him into the phallic object that inspires fear, awe and envy. See Dany Nobus, Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

44. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus.

45. Félix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm. Power, 1995.

46. Jill M. Hooley, Abnormal Psychology. Pearson, 2020.

47. Dany Nobus, Key Concepts of Lacanian Psychoanalysis.

48. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘The Second Positive Task’. Anti-Oedipus.

49. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, ‘The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis’. Anti-Oedipus.

50. Astrid Gessert, Obsessional Neurosis.

51. Fascism invests in an imaginary messiah who ‘returns’ the earth to a natural and ideal order. In the Lacanian sense, this betrays an investment in the Father and the phallic mental ecology that he represents.

52. William Shakespeare, Tragedy of Hamlet Edited by E Dowden.

53. Thomas Bernhard, Correction. Random House, 2013.

54. Here, the negation of negation is used in the Adornoian sense where succeeding negations indicate the incomplete negativity of preceding negations. See Jeffrey W. Salyer, ‘Mastery and Mock Dialectic in Thomas Bernhard’s Correction’, 2010. In obsessive neurosis, the negation of negation selectively reinforces the capitalist socius and punishes attempts to break free from it.

55. Sam Shuler, ‘Carrion Crow’, pp. 13-14.

56. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Bloomsbury, London [U.A.], 2017.

57. Astrid Gessert, Obsessional Neurosis.

58. Ibid.

59. Regarding the question of homosexual becomings, Deleuze and Guattari write, ‘[N]o “gay liberation movement” is possible as long as homosexuality is caught up in a relation of exclusive disjunction with heterosexuality, a relation that ascribes them both to a common Oedipal and castrating stock, charged with ensuring only their differentiation in two non-communicating series, instead of bringing to light their reciprocal inclusion and their transverse communication in the decoded flows of desire (included disjunctions, local connections, nomadic conjunctions) […]’ Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, pp. 350-351.