The recent revelation, obliquely nudged into the limelight by Trump, that Biden was executed by unknown persons and replaced with a robot double should make the old Freudians among us ponder the old old story of a classic paper by Victor Tausk, one of Freud’s rebellious disciples: On the Origins of the Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia. His paper first appeared in the International Journal of Medical Psychoanalysis in 1919. It has since had an interesting history, in tandem with the often disputed facts in the Tausk case.
In the 1960s, Tausk was discovered by a man named Paul Roazen, who then wrote a very 60s book about him, Brother Animal. This book, in turn, provoked the entire Freudian establishment in the U.S., led by an analyst named Kurt Eissler, who at the time had incredible institutional power. Eissler wrote an entire book about Roazen’s book, a massive refutation of Roazen’s thesis that Freud was “responsible” for Tausk’s suicide in 1919. The stakes, for Eissler, couldn’t have been higher – he took it upon himself to defend Freud, a “genius”, against Tausk, a mere “talent”, proving conclusively, at least to his own satisfaction, that Freud wasn’t responsible for Tausk’s suicide.
Looking back at this from a distance, what was most noteworthy was not the sad trajectory of Victor Tausk but the court politics in the highest circle of Freudians in the Anglophone world at the time, with these disputes as distant and unimportant as the disputes between the Green and Blue factions in Byzantium. At the time, however, the Roazen versus the Freudians conflict seemed to creat alignments between most of the intellectuals in New York city.
Ah, for the days when there were intellectuals in New York City!
To return to Tausk’s essay: in his clinical work, after the war, Tausk had come upon a patient who had a very vivid sense of being influenced by a machine. In 1918, at the end of the war, as the ancien regime was crumbling in Central Europe, the movie industry was making giant leaps, attracting an audience of peasants, villagers and urbanites. Caught in the synapse of the moment, Tausk’s patient described a machine that was influencing her mind, and the minds of others, that was a bit like a movie projector – at least in as much as it created two dimensional images on walls and windows.
Or, to quote Tausk’s paper”
“l. It makes the patients see pictures. When this is the case, the machine is generally a magic lantern or cinematograph. The pictures are seen on a single plane, on walls or windowpanes, and unlike typical visual hallucinations are not three-dimensional. 2. It produces, as well as removes, thoughts and feelings by means of waves or rays or mysterious forces which the patient's knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain. In such cases, the machine is often called a "suggestion-apparatus." Its construction cannot be explained, but its function consists in the transmission or "draining off" of thoughts and feelings by one or several persecutors. 3. It produces motor phenomena in the body, erections and seminal emissions, that are intended to deprive the patient of his male potency and weaken him. This is accomplished either by means of suggestion or by air-currents, electricity, magnetism, or X-rays.”
If Tausk could be magically resurrected from the Central Cemetery in Vienna where he was buried and hurried through the streets of Paris, or any city, today, he might be amazed by the fact that some such machine is being held in the hands of one out of ten pedestrians, busy flicking through Instagram as they negotiate the traffic.
This is an old person’s impression – my impression, who remember life before the cell phone.
In the collective subconscious, however, I think this is more than an old person’s impression. The idea of an influencing machine, a mind control machine, which somehow gets into the body – maybe through vaccines! – has become itself a machine in the right wing system of paranoia, with its representatives as the secretaries of most of Trump’s cabinet today.
The image of the executed enemy – Biden – who is replaced by a robot is an almost perfect dream image in the classic Freudian style, in which the image condenses over a contradiction it can neither avoid nor tell. Who executed Biden? The logical answer is that it was Biden’s enemy. But Biden’s enemy is the conspirator him or herself. In dream logic, this answer has to be avoided at all cost. Luckily, we have an influencing machine to guide us. Artificial intelligence is the House, y’all!
A classic Freudian would, at this point, look around for the sexual desire. Here I think we have a clue to the odd importance accorded to gender, and especially those who have transitioned. The site of this issue is, precisely, the bathroom. The bathroom is a tremendously important place in the American political unconscious. Who gets to go into the bathroom, the public bathroom, takes up an extraordinary amount of space in your American burger’s day to day thought processes. That black people, that illegal immigrants, can be in the next booth, just shitting freely and emitting their noxiousness and assaulting your Aryan nostrils, drives this burger to the voting booth to elect those who will stop all this. And perhaps stop shitting all together, so that we can live cleanly, no excrement allowed!
The impossible desire for an absolute cleanliness, a purge to overshadow all purges, allows contradictory figures to emerge - people who engage in statuatory rape, or pay porn stars to fuck them, becoming the crusaders for this dream. In the rightwing dream time, the more criminal, the more coplike our leaders become. Top cops every one of them.
The influencing machine and the public toilet are two poles of the Trumpian moment. What this tells us about the strategy we can use to overturn that moment is an exercise I leave to the reader.
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