On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia

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 and, according to consensus among today's psychiatrists, remains Tausk's most enduring contribution to the study of mental illnesses.

Presentation

For schizophrenic patients, the boundaries between the self and the exterior world, or between the self as subject and object, are blurred; the patients may feel that their experience of the subjective self is reduced to the extent that they are completely under the control of an external force. According to Tausk, the loss of ego boundaries in schizophrenia is accompanied by a regression to pregenital narcissistic states, in which the child could not yet distinguish between the self and the exterior world and believed that their parents or God knew all their thoughts.

Tausk observes the gradual transformation of an influencing machine in a young female patient's delusions: Initially manifest in the exact form of her own body, the influencing machine became increasingly mechanical until it lost any resemblance to her physique. He concludes that influencing machines are always a projection of the patient's own body onto the exterior world and that the libido motivating the projection has regressed to an infantile pregenital stage.

The patients often show a remarkable interest in learning about current technology so that they can explain the operation of the influencing machine. Yet, even with the benefit of this understanding, the machine always has a mystical quality beyond explanation. Its described effects include:

• Causing the patient to see two-dimensional images as if projected onto their surroundings
• Creating and removing thoughts in the patient's mind by means of waves or rays
• Producing odd sensations and physiological changes in the body, with particular attention to the sex organs, through electricity, magnetism or other action at a distance.

The patient imagines the machine's presence only after a psychotic experience has occurred. The delusion therefore fulfills the patient's need for a causal explanation of otherwise inexplicable events, and indicates that schizophrenia is in an advanced stage of development.