Nous tenterons de situer, dans le contexte psychiatrique et psychanalytique de son temps, l’article sur la genèse de « l’appareil à influencer » de Viktor Tausk.

Nous verrons comment, comme sorte de synthèse de travaux sur l’évolution des délires, ont émergé des travaux structuralistes en psychiatrie qui ont permis une meilleure analyse des phénomènes automatiques dans les psychoses, qui ont été aussi au carrefour de la rencontre entre les travaux psychiatriques de Clérambault et le mouvement structuraliste en psychanalyse.

À ce même carrefour, se situe le travail de Tausk sur l’automatisme dans les psychoses.

Il est, de ce fait, structuraliste avant son ère, car il va au-delà de la théorie freudienne sur les psychoses de cette même période, jusqu’à une conception du « symptôme » psychotique en tant que « condensateur de jouissance ».

Ce n’est pas un hasard si à l’époque de l’automatisation de la production ont émergé des théories psychanalytiques sur l’automatisme créateur de l’inconscient, et, de plus, sur les phénomènes automatiques dans la psychose.

This paper will attempt to place Viktor Tausk's famous article on the genesis of the “influencing machine” in schizophrenia within the psychiatric and psychoanalytic context of its time, particularly in relation to the concepts of structure and automatism.

Following the summary of Tausk's paper, we will analyse the predominant ideas concerning the evolution of delusion in time, in psychiatry of the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. We will then look into how, as a result of this evolution, some more or less structuralist works arose, which permitted, among other things, a better analysis of automatic phenomena in psychoses. These phenomena have also been at the confluence of the psychiatric work of Clérambault and the psychoanalytic structuralist movement initiated by Jacques Lacan.

It is at the crossroad between the works of the two that we may place, though in an independent register, Tausk's pioneering work on automatism in psychoses, which is not only a commentary on the evolution of delusion, but also on the underlying element that presides over delusion, from the point of its initial hypochondriac state to the generation of persecutory delusion ideas, amongst which the existence of an “influencing machine”.

Tausk's work, akin to Clérambault's and Lacan's on automatism, may thus be considered structuralist before its time. More specifically, his swan song – the “influencing machine” paper – goes beyond the Freudian theory on psychoses of the time, which focused on the psychotic's denied homosexuality, and up to the concept of the psychotic “symptom” as a capacitor of enjoyment (jouissance).

It is most singular that at the time of production's automation during the industrial revolution, not only were delusions modified in relation to this evolution, but there was also the development of psychoanalytic theories on the creative automatism of the unconscious, and on the automatic phenomena of the psychosis, which are related to the former. Concerning these phenomena, the influencing ideas have been the subject of several studies, by Freud and Tausk firstly, and by Clérambault and Lacan later on, each time both accusing the other of plagiarism.