Influencing_Machine
On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia
1919 article in psychoanalysis
"On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia" (German: Über die Entstehung des „Beeinflussungsapparates“ in der Schizophrenie) is an article written by Austrian psychoanalyst Victor Tausk. He read it to and discussed it with the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in January 1918.[1] It was first published in 1919 in the German-language journal Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and, after translation into English by Dorian Feigenbaum, in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1933.[1]
The article describes Tausk's observations and interpretations of several persecutory delusions that plagued some of his patients who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia. They believed their thoughts and bodily sensations were controlled by a machine that defied their technical comprehension and secretly influenced them from a distance, often claiming that it was operated by a group of people who were persecuting them. The accused users of the machine were almost always males and, in many of the cases Tausk witnessed, physicians who had treated the patients.
The paper has become a classic in the psychological understanding of schizophrenia[2] and, according to consensus among today's psychiatrists, remains Tausk's most enduring contribution to the study of mental illnesses.[3]