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Critical perspectives

Contemporary French philosophers Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze asserted that the institution of psychoanalysis has become a center of power, and that its confessional techniques resemble those included and utilized within the Christian religion.

French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan criticized the emphasis of some American and British psychoanalytical traditions on what he has viewed as the suggestion of imaginary "causes" for symptoms, and recommended the return to Freud.

Belgian psycholinguist and psychoanalyst Luce Irigaray also criticized psychoanalysis, employing Jacques Derrida 's concept of phallogocentrism to describe the exclusion of the woman both from Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalytical theories.

Together with Deleuze, the French psychoanalyst and psychiatrist Félix Guattari criticized the Oedipal and schizophrenic power structure of psychoanalysis and its connivance with capitalism in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980), the two volumes of their theoretical work Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus take the cases of Gérard Mendel, Bela Grunberger, and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel, prominent members of the most respected psychoanalytical associations (including the IPA), to suggest that, traditionally, psychoanalysis had always enthusiastically enjoyed and embraced a police state throughout its history.