About the " Psycho-suiciders"

Karen & Adrian Stephen  Eugenie Sokolnicka  Sophie Morgenstern  Istvan Hollos   Sabina Spielrein              Viktor Tausk     Otto Gross   Wilhelm Stekel    Paul Federn  Bruno Bettelheim   Masud Khan   Max Kahane   Herbert Silberer   Monroe Meyer    Martin Peck       Karl Schroetter   Johann Honegger   Edward Bibring  Karl Landauer  Clara Happel  Horace Frink

Background music: Tachanka [Tachanka] music: K. Listov, lyrics: M. Ruderman; 1936

  About the Psychosuiciders

<Outre Federn, Stekel, Tausk et Silberer, on trouve d'autres suicidés parmi les analystes du premier groupe Karin Stephen, Eugenia Sokolnicka, Tatiana Rosenthal, Kan Schrötter, Monroe Meyer, Martin Peck, Max Kahane, Johann Honegger. (...) Il n'en demeure pas moins troublant que ces premiers analystes se soient si souvent donné la mort, lorsqu'il ne leur arrivait pas d'autres malheurs.>> (Paul Roazen, "Freud and his followers", version française, 1974, New York, Knopf)

  VIKTOR TAUSK (1877-1919)

(source: Wikipedia)

Viktor Tausk (1879/1880, Zsolna/Žilina, Northern Hungary - July 3, 1919) was a pioneer psychoanalyst and neurologist. A student and a colleague of Sigmund Freud and the earliest exponent of psychoanalytical concepts with regard to clinical psychosis and the personality of the artist.

In 1919 after he had stepped out from Freud's shadow, Tausk published a paper on the origin of a delusion common to a wide array of schizophrenic patients, namely that an alien device, malignant and remote, had influenced their thoughts and their behaviour. This device was referred to as the Influencing Machine and the paper was called On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia. It is the most well known of his publications and it has reached outside of his own field of research into others, such as literary theory for example.

On the morning of July 3 1919 after Helene Deutsch had stopped Tausk’s treatment, Freud had demanded it, and after a complicated ménage à trois with Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé, Tausk committed suicide.

Selected bibliography

• Victor Tausk. Sexuality, War and Schizophrenia: Collected Psychoanalytic Papers (Philanthropy and Society) (1990) ISBN 0887383653

Books on Viktor Tausk

• Paul Roazen. Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk ISBN 0814773958
• Kurt R. Eissler. Victor Tausk's Suicide (1983) ISBN 0823667359
• Kurt R. Eissler. Talent and genius: The fictitious case of Tausk contra Freud (1971)ISBN 0802100899

 

Victor Tausk (1877-1919) introduced by Martin Grotjahn and Hans A. Illing (source: Alexander F., Eisenstein S., Grotjahn M.[Eds], <<Psychoanalytic Pioneers>>, Basic Books, 1966) <<§ A Life in Search Victor Tausk was born in Croatia - now a province of Yugoslavia, but at that time a part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He studied law and was appointed judge in a small town in Bosnia. For unknown reasons, which Sigmund Freud later called a "very serious personal experience", he abandoned the practice of law and settled in Berlin as a reporter. From there, he moved to Vienna. Tausk took psychoanalysis so seriously that he changed professions for a third time and studied medicine. A year before the outbreak of World War I, he obtained a medical degree, in addition to the law degree he already held. During World War I, Tausk became a high-ranking medical officer in the Imperial Austrian Army. On March 7, 1919, less than a year after the Armistice, he ended his career by suicide at the age of forty-two. Freud wrote to  Lou Andreas-Salomé that poor Tausk, whom she had honored with her friendship, has ended his life. Photo: Lou Andreas-Salomé He had returned from war exhausted, worn out by its horrors. While trying to build up a new life under most unfavorable conditions in Vienna, he also had planned to include a new wife, whom he was to marry eight days later. In his farewell letters, written minutes before his suicide, he addressed his bride-to-be, his first wife, and Sigmund Freud. The notes are all tender and reaffirm his contact with reality. His decision to end his life, Tausk attributed to his "inadequacy and failure". In his obituary, Freud described Tausk (whom he had once viewed with suspicion as "a wild man") as "intensely conscientious", and attributed to him  a strong sense of observation, sure judgement, and special clarity of expression. In his letter to Lou Andreas-Salomé, who had been an intimate friend of Tausk, Freud made an attempt to understand the "problem of Tausk's personality". In answer to Freud, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote (1958, p. 189): Poor Tausk. I was so fond of him. I thought I knew him well, and yet I never, never thought it would be suicide. ...  Had he chosen a weapon, then I could have imagined that his death was that of one who is simultaneously an aggressive and a passive person. For this was the Tauskproblem, its danger, which also was its stimulus; even in such a strong character, everything remains the impotence of a midget facing the inner giant of immoderation. § The Influencing Machine It is rare in the history of psychoanalysis that a man secures his place in the annals of psychoanalytic research through the publication of a single major paper. Victor Tausk is perhaps the only analytic pioneer to have done so. The same year that saw Tausk's life end suddenly at the age of forty-two, 1919, also witnessed the publication of his famous paper, "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia" (1933). Together with Freud's psychoanalysis of the Schreber Case of 1911 (1953, Vol. 17), this contribution opens the doors to the psychoanalytic study of psychosis. Photo: Daniel P. Schreber A third paper, on an equally high level, stands in close relationship to Tausk's; written at approximately the same time by Hanns Sachs, it is entitled, "The Delay of the Machine Age" (1933). Tausk's paper applies his general ideas that, in reality and illusion, machines are man's unconscious projection of his body image into the outer world. When Robert Fliess chose Victor Tausk's work for inclusion in The Psychoanalytic Reader, his anthology of essential contributions to analysis, he said in introduction (1946, p. 53): Yet the paper violates almost all pedestrian standards for publication. Much of the text is contained in footnotes, no section can be given an adequate heading; and the paper cannot be abstracted without being practically rewritten. According to Tausk, the symbol of the machine represents the patient's genitals. In this way, the schizophrenic's hallucination is like the dream of the neurotic, for Freud had discovered that, as a rule, complicated machines appearing in dreams represent the patient's genitals. Tausk found that the machines stand in the service of masturbatory fantasies - partly serving wish-fulfillment, but mostly denying the wish and embellishing it with psychotic symptoms. The persecutory influencing machine is a representation of the patient's genitals projected onto the outer world. In machine dreams, the sleeper often awakens after having dreamed of manipulating parts of the machine. It is the frequent complaint of the schizophrenic that the apparatus causes erections and drainage of semen and weakens potency. Frequently, the influencing machine makes the patient see pictures. Often the machine becomes a "cinematograph", although, unlike typical visual hallucinations, the pictures are not three-dimensional. The schizophrenic believes that, under the control of one or many persecutors, the machine may work in the transmission of thoughts or in the elimination of feelings. He believes that this machine may produce motor phenomena in the body, erections, or seminal emissions that weaken the patient and deprive him of his potency. This may be accomplished by suggestion, hypnosis, magnetism, or some type of ray; it creates the sensation of being influenced. The feelings cannot be described because they are strange to the patient himself; they are harmful and persecutory. Tausk described schematically the different phenomena that are produced by the influencing machine but that may occur without it. These are: (1) sensations of inner change, both in psychic and physical functions within various parts of one's own body; (2) feelings of abnormal sensations; (3) feelings of awareness of an originator, who may not be the patient himself; (4) feelings accompanied by hallucinatory projection of the inner occurrence to the external world, without awareness of an originator; (5) feelings of inner change accompanied by awareness of an external originator, as a result of identification; (6) feelings accompanied by projection of the inner occurrence to the outer world, and belief in an originator produced by paranoid mechanism; and (7) feelings of change attributed to the workings of the influencing machine manipulated by enemies. Tausk assumed three stages in the history of the development of the influencing machine: (1) the sense of internal alteration produced by the influx of libido into a given organ (hypochondria); (2) the feeling of estrangement produced by rejection whereby the pathologically altered organs and their functions are so-to-speak denied and eliminated as something alien to the wholly or partially sound organs and functions accepted by the ego; (3) the sense of persecution (paranoia somatica) arising from projection of the pathological alteration onto the outer world, (a) by attribution of the alteration to a foreign hostile power, and (b) by the construction of the influencing machine as a summation of some or all of the psychologically altered organs projected outward. Tausk concluded that the "evolution by distortion of the human apparatus into a machine is a projection that corresponds to the development of the pathological process which converts the ego into a diffuse sexual being or into a genital, a machine independent of the aims of the ego and subordinated to a foreign will. It is no longer subordinated to the will of the ego, but dominates it". The few other earlier writings of Tausk deal with the problems of repression, ejaculatio praecox, libido tonus, delirium tremens, depersonalization, catatonia, ideas of persecution, and problems of melancholia. Photo: a portrait of Lou Andreas-Salomé § The "Tausk Problem" Tausk's best memorial is provided by his own writings about schizophrenia; they keep his memory alive, as does the sad and devoted obituary by Freud. One additional close friend, Lou Andreas-Salomé, has tried to deal with the "Tausk problem", as she called it: in her memoirs (Leavy, 1964), which demonstrate so well her gift for friendship and empathy with many of the great and famous men of the time, she devoted several chapters to Tausk, who was her teacher and friend. When she came to Vienna to "go to school with Freud", he reccomended that she attend Tausk's lectures. In 1912, Tausk was probably the first analyst aside from Freud to combine the simultaneous teaching for psychiatry and psychoanalysis. On Wednesday, evenings, both teacher and pupil attended the discussions on psychoanalysis at Freud's home. On November 19, 1912, Lou Andreas-Salomé wrote concerning Tausk's lectures: "In fact one gets the impression not only of classical Freudian theory but also of an unusually loving and reverent approach to the essential discoveries of Freud ...". (Leavy, 1964, p. 51). A further entry in her diary, dated November 27, 1912, reads: "It seems to me that in comparison with all the others, Tausk not only adheres completely to Freud's views, but he surpasses the rest. Perhaps this is bound to result in a direct, mutual conflict". "I think that Tausk is of all the most unconditionally devoted to Freud and at the same time the most prominently outstanding" (Leavy, 1964, p.57). It is only a short distance from an obscure Croatian village to the Vienna of pre-World War I times, but it is a long journey from "a serious personal experience" to the trust and friendship of two such personalities as Sigmund Freud and Lou Andreas-Salomé. Tausk responded to this friendship and trust with one great contribution to psychoanalysis. Then, like a marathon runner, he fell>> REFERENCES Andreas-Salomé, Lou, "In der Schule bei Freud, Tagebuch eines Jahres 1912-1913", Zurich, Max Neihans Verlag, 1958. Fliess R., "The psychoanalytic reader", Vol. 1, New York, Inter. Univ. Press, 1946. Freud S., "The complete psychological works of...", London, Hogarth Press, 1953, 24 vols. Leavy S. A. (Trans.), "The Freud Journal of Lou Andreas-Salomé", New York, Basic Books, 1964. Sachs H., "The delay of the machine age", Margaret J. Powers (Trans.), Psychoanal. Quart., 1933, 2, 402-424. Tausk V., "On the origin of the influencing machine in schizophrenia", Psychoanal. Quart., 1933, 2, 519-556.   BIBLIOGRAPHY Grinstein A., "Index of psychoanalytic writings", Vol.4, New York, International Universities Press, 1958. Jones E., "The life and work of Sigmund Freud", Vol.2. "Years of Maturity", New York, Basic Books, 1955. Peters H.F., "My sister, my spouse", New York, W.W. Norton, 1963. "Victor Tausk, a review", Int. Z. Psychoanal., 1919, 7, 225-227.