From psychoanalysis to schizoanalysis: Chaos and complexity in therapeutic practice.

Human life is engaged in a continual process of mapping and modelling the external universe. From the immediate level of sensation to more abstract forms of emotional and cognitive mapping, the human organism builds a web of inner experience which forms the basis for the construction/perception of "reality." This act of learning forms the genetic, neural, linguistic, and social programing by which individual and collective subjectivity is constructed. Theories in philosophy and science are simply more abstract higher- level models of reality akin to our neuro-semantic mappings. They are similar to cultural, artistic, and religious stories in that their modelling includes not only process but the organized gestalt of content which endows the model with meaning in inner experience. If we move to a higher level of modeling by metamodeling we can understand how various theories of human life have mapped reality. The transversal linking of various theories or models allows us to create clearer maps about process and to transcend the differences resulting from content which supply meaning to inner subjectivity and which organize theories, disciplines, and practices like religious belief systems. Schizoanalytic metamodeling engages this transversal process of communication by which two or more different perspectives of the real - two or more subjectivities or realities - are transcended by moving to the next higher logical level in a nested hierarchy of organization. Schizoanalysis was one of the names Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze gave to their lifelong project of reinventing psychoanalysis and therapeutic practice and extending it into the material and social field. By giving a name to this practice and outlining its essence they began to gather together the work of various clinicians, artists, philosophers, and scientists who - though isolated - were already engaged in such a project of transforming human experience and whose history has just begun to be told. The present work continues the development of schizoanalysis as a clinical and cultural practice