On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia

"On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia" is an article written by psychoanalyst Viktor Tausk. It was first published in 1919 in the journal Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and then, after translation into English by Dorian Feigenbaum, in the Psychoanalytic Quarterly in 1933.

The paper describes Tausk's observations and psychoanalytic interpretation of what has been defined as a type of paranoid delusion that occurs in patients who are diagnosed with schizophrenia by someone holding the relevant medical license. What he portrays as delusion often involves their being influenced by a "diabolical machine", just outside the technical understanding of the victim, that influences them from afar. This was an attempt to explain what they believed to be a group of people who were persecuting the individual, whom Tausk suggested were "to the best of my knowledge, almost exclusively of the male sex" and the persecutors, "predominantly physicians by whom the patient has been treated".

These presumed delusions are defined in contemporary psychiatry as "passivity delusions" or "passivity phenomena" and are listed among Kurt Schneider's 'first rank' symptoms which are thought to be particularly diagnostic of schizophrenia, and still form some of the core diagnostic criteria.

The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. It consists of boxes, cranks, levers, wheels, buttons, wires, batteries, and the like. Patients endeavor to discover the construction of the apparatus by means of their technical knowledge, and it appears that with the progressive popularization of the sciences, all the forces known to technology are utilized to explain the functioning of the apparatus. All the discoveries of mankind, however, are regarded as inadequate to explain the marvelous powers of this machine, by which the patients feel themselves persecuted.

The main effects of the influencing machine are the following:

Tausk's paper has been highly influential within both his own field of psychoanalysis and outside. It has in more recent years been used in literary theory to explain characters' de-centeredness from their surroundings and their psychical collapse into psychosis. Furthermore, the idea of a great alien machine taking over the human race has become a stock element of certain types of popular fiction.

...
Wikipedia