Institutional psychotherapy

Although similar to anti-psychiatry in its institutional critique, the founders of institutional psychotherapy were adamant about distinguishing their approach from it, claiming that anti-psychiatry failed to account for the reality of mental illness, arguing that psychosis is not merely a social construct, and were open to neuroleptics and even, at times, to electroconvulsive therapy. Guattari wrote of a "systematic failure" of many psychiatrists to understand "what was going on outside the hospital walls", leading to a tendency to psychologize social problems. According to Guattari, the goal was to "never to isolate the study of mental illness from its social and institutional context, and... to analyze institutions on the basis of interpreting the real, symbolic and imaginary effects of society upon individuals."

Institutional psychotherapy and the terminology used by the psychoanalysts associated with it took on a noticeable evolution throughout the 1960s to 1980s. After Guattari began to distance himself from the concept of schizoanalysis (only one year after the 1972 publication of Anti-Oedipus), he proposed that "institutional analysis" be used instead of "institutional psychotherapy". This change in nomenclature represented Guattari's intention to direct the practice at the La Borde Clinic toward a more political direction, calling for "a political analysis of desire." Guattari offered an extensive critique of institutional psychotherapy in the beginning of Molecular Revolution (1984) and introduced the concept of "institutional analysis". Guattari referred to the interactive transference that occurred at the La Borde Clinic as "transversality", while Oury called it "transferential constellation".