In the book, Deleuze and Guattari developed the concepts and theories in schizoanalysis, a loose critical practice initiated from the standpoint of schizophrenia and psychosis as well as from the social progress that capitalism has spurred.

[1] Contrary to contemporary French uses of the ideas of Sigmund Freud, they outlined a "materialist psychiatry" modeled on the unconscious regarded as an aggregate of productive processes of desire, incorporating their concept of desiring-production which interrelates desiring-machines and bodies without organs, and repurpose Karl Marx's historical materialism to detail their different organizations of social production, "recording surfaces", coding, territorialization and the act of "inscription".

Deleuze and Guattari also draw on and criticize the philosophies and theories of: Spinoza, Kant, Charles Fourier, Charles Sanders Peirce, Carl Jung, Melanie Klein, Karl Jaspers, Lewis Mumford, Karl August Wittfogel, Wilhelm Reich, Georges Bataille, Louis Hjelmslev, Jacques Lacan, Gregory Bateson, Pierre Klossowski, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jacques Monod, Louis Althusser, Victor Turner, Jean Oury, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, R. D. Laing, David Cooper, and Pierre Clastres.

[2] They additionally draw on authors and artists whose works demonstrate their concept of schizophrenia as "the universe of productive and reproductive desiring-machines",[3] such as Antonin Artaud, Samuel Beckett, Georg Büchner, Samuel Butler, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Marcel Proust, Arthur Rimbaud, Daniel Paul Schreber, Adolf Wölfli, Vaslav Nijinsky, Gérard de Nerval and J. M. W.

"The truth is," Deleuze and Guattari explain, "sexuality is everywhere: the way a bureaucrat fondles his records, a judge administers justice, a businessman causes money to circulate; the way the bourgeoisie fucks the proletariat; and so on.

[15] Alternative conceptions, which treat desire as a positive, productive force, have received far less attention; the ideas of the small number of philosophers who have developed them, however, are of crucial importance to Deleuze and Guattari's project: principally Nietzsche's will to power and Spinoza's conatus.

Deleuze and Guattari develop a critique of Freud and Lacan's psychoanalysis, anti-psychiatry, and Freudo-Marxism (with its insistence on a necessary mediation between the two realms of desire and the social).

"[22] The "anti-" part of their critique of the Freudian Oedipal complex begins with that original model's articulation of society[clarification needed] based on the family triangle of father, mother and child.

Bodies without organs cannot be forced or willed into existence, however, and they are essentially the product of a zero-intensity condition that Deleuze and Guattari link to catatonic schizophrenia that also becomes "the model of death".

[...] notice of the dominant tone in the most respected associations: consider Dr. Mendel and the Drs Stéphane, the state of fury that is theirs, and their literally police-like appeal at the thought that someone might try to escape the Oedipal dragnet.

Oedipus is one of those things that becomes all the more dangerous the less people believe in it; then the cops are there to replace the high priests.Bela Grunberger and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel were two psychoanalysts from the Paris section of the International Psychoanalytical Association.

In November 1968 they disguised themselves under the pseudonym André Stéphane and published L'univers Contestationnaire, in which they argued that the left-wing rioters of May 68 were totalitarian stalinists, and proceeded to psychoanalyze them as having a sordid infantilism caught up in an Oedipal revolt against the Father.

"To address this question, Deleuze and Guattari examine the relationships between social organisation, power, and desire, particularly in relation to the Freudian "Oedipus complex" and its familial mechanisms of subjectivation ("daddy-mommy-me").

[35] By using this powerful mechanism, the dominant class, "making cuts (coupures) and segregations pass over into a social field", can ultimately control individuals or groups, ensuring general submission.

"[39] Although (like most Deleuzo-Guattarian terms) deterritorialization has a purposeful variance in meaning throughout their oeuvre, it can be roughly described as a move away from a rigidly imposed hierarchical, arborescent context, which seeks to package things (concepts, objects, etc.)

Importantly, the concept implies a continuum, not a simple binary – every actual assemblage (a flexible term alluding to the heterogeneous composition of any complex system, individual, social, geological) is marked by simultaneous movements of territorialization (maintenance) and of deterritorialization (dissipation).

Foucault considered the book's three "adversaries" as the "bureaucrats of the revolution", the "poor technicians of desire" (psychoanalysts and semiologists), and "the major enemy", fascism.

Foucault argued that putting the principles espoused in Anti-Oedipus into practice involves freeing political action from "unitary and totalizing paranoia" and withdrawing allegiance "from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality.

"[43] The psychiatrist David Cooper described Anti-Oedipus as "a magnificent vision of madness as a revolutionary force", crediting its authors with using "the psychoanalytic language and the discourse of Saussure (and his successors)" to pit "linguistics against itself in what is already proving to be an historic act of depassment.

"[45] The philosopher Douglas Kellner described Anti-Oedipus as its era's publishing sensation, and, along with Jean-François Lyotard's Libidinal Economy (1974), a key text in "the micropolitics of desire.

He believed that Deleuze and Guattari see the individual as "no more than various organs, intensities and flows, rather than a complex, contradictory identity" and make false emancipatory claims for schizophrenia.

[49] The philosopher Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen and the psychologist Sonu Shamdasani wrote that rather than having their confidence shaken by the "provocations and magnificent rhetorical violence" of Anti-Oedipus, the psychoanalytic profession felt that the debates raised by the book legitimated their discipline.

[50] Joshua Ramey wrote that while the passage into Deleuze and Guattari's "body without organs" is "fraught with danger and even pain ... the point of Anti-Oedipus is not to make glamorous that violence or that suffering.