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." The critic Frederick Crews wrote that when Deleuze and Guattari "indicted Lacanian psychoanalysis as a capitalist disorder" and "pilloried analysts as the most sinister priest-manipulators of a psychotic society", their "demonstration was widely regarded as unanswerable" and "devastated the already shrinking Lacanian camp in Paris." 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." The psychoanalyst Joel Kovel wrote that Deleuze and Guattari provided a definitive challenge to the mystique of the family, but that they did so in the spirit of nihilism, commenting, "Immersion in their world of 'schizoculture' and desiring machines is enough to make a person yearn for the secure madness of the nuclear family."