Schizoanalysis insists against the grain of orthodox psychoanalysis on the role of actual social factors in shaping psychic life. Taking the Freudian notion of “deferred action” elaborated by Lacan to its radical conclusion, Deleuze and Guattari assert that actual engagement with social life shapes the psyche by determining which early memory-traces are endowed “after the fact” with psychic effectivity and “meaning” for the adult. In the case of Baudelaire, it is not overly severe fathering but the authoritarian regime of Napoleon III that invalidates the super-ego; not memories of an indulgent François-Joseph Baudelaire but discovery of the martyrdom of Edgar Allan Poe that furnishes an ego-ideal role model for Baudelaire the writer; not inconsistent mothering but the quandaries of the impoverished urban poet in nascent consumer society that induce psychic splitting and generate the key figures of prostitute and dandy appearing in the mature poetry. At its worst, psychoanalysis completely excludes social determinations from consideration; at best, it projects those determinations onto “family romance” and thereby obscures their historical origins and political implications. For schizoanalysis, desire is not formed once and for all “inside” the nuclear family and then sent forth to negotiate the “outside” world as best it can: desire knows no “inside” or “outside”; it invests the entire social formation (including, of course, local family structures); it is continually formed, deformed, and reformed in and through contact with the social milieu.