Authors like Félix Guattari

Pierre-Félix Guattari ( gwə-TAR-ee, French: [pjɛʁ feliks ɡwataʁi] (listen); April 30, 1930 – August 29, 1992) was a French psychoanalyst, political philosopher, semiotician, social activist, and screenwriter. He co-founded schizoanalysis with Gilles Deleuze, and ecosophy with Arne Næss, and is best known for his literary and philosophical collaborations with Deleuze, most notably Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Guattari was born in Villeneuve-les-Sablons, a working-class suburb of northwest Paris, France. His father was a factory manager and he was engaged in Trotskyist political activism as a teenager, before studying for a pharmacology degree. He trained under (and was analyzed by) the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan in the early 1950s. Subsequently, he worked all his life at the experimental psychiatric clinic of La Borde under the direction of Lacan's pupil, the psychiatrist Jean Oury. He first met Oury at a private psychiatric clinic in Saumery in the Loire region at the suggestion of Oury's brother Fernand, who had been Guattari's high school teacher. Guattari followed Oury to La Borde in 1955, two years after it had been established. La Borde was a venue for conversation among many students of philosophy, psychology, ethnology, and social work.