During the final phase of her illness, Natalija A. was convinced that the doctor became part of a machine that controlled her thoughts, behaviour, menstrual cycle, all physiological activities and libido. She claimed that it was a forbidden machine built in Berlin and that she was one of several guinea pigs that were being experimented on. When she found out about Doctor’s suicide, her opinion of him was less harsh, she even felt sorry and all of a sudden everything became clear. She rushed into the precinct, and handed in a piece of paper demanding to see the Chief Inspector with regard to the death of Viktor Tausk, her physician. A clerk welcomed her, introduced himself as detective inspector and offered her a seat. She could lip-read very well, and, in principle, she could speak, but she did not want to, so she communicated in writing. It was the first time after many years that she opened her mouth at the police station. A baffling, painful and ugly grimace contorted her face and out came a sound. It was nothing short of a miracle. As if a chain around her tongue had got loose and a stream of throaty sounds gushed out:
“They killed him. It’s their doing. Because he refused to cooperate. It was a mean kill, made it look like suicide. I know everything about it. Ask me. After all, he was a good man,” she said excitedly. The police clerk attributed her strangely articulated speech to the fact that Natalija, as a foreigner, a Slavic woman it would seem, did not speak German very well.
“They had to. They had to… When the guilt became unbearable, when he saw where all of it was leading to, I mean, the manipulation of people, the death machines…” – she took out a handkerchief and wiped her tears – “he wanted to get out. But he couldn’t: he knew too much and they had to do it. Yes, I can testify, they had to do it, I know, because they tried the same with me. First they took my hearing, and my voice, and my period, then they began whispering to kill myself, every night, day in, day out, for years. They invaded my brain directly: Natalija, now you have to take the knife. Natalija, go to the kitchen and take the knife. Take knife. Take knife, take knife…”
Her voice was piercing. She screamed, “Kniiife!” took a paper knife from the table and stabbed the back of her hand as hard as she could. It took two police officers to hold her and take her out. Once outside, she seemed calm, agreed for the officers to escort her home, when suddenly she tore off from their grip and ran away to the market, where she got drowned in the crowd.
The schizophrenic machine that made Natalija run like a dog chasing its own tail was not endemic only to her kind of madness. It was a common feature of the imagination among a special class of people, marginalized as psychos and dangerous lunatics. What was so specific to the imaginary machine made doctor Tausk stop and look for a logical explanation: the description of technology and the basic principle on which the machine operated were similar, almost identical from patient to patient, even with other doctor’s patients, regardless of age, educational background or gender. He took the following note:
“Schizophrenic manipulation machine is a device of mystical nature. The patient can only hint at how it is constructed. It consists of boxes, handles, levers, buttons, wires, batteries and similar parts. Patients try to discover more about the machine based on their technical knowledge, but it seems that with the growing number of popular scientific publications, they gain more advantage to explain common technological principles on which the machine functions. However, all the scientific discoveries in the world cannot suffice to describe the striking abilities of the machine that all of the patients claim to be haunted by.”
The machine produces images similarly to a magic lantern or a cinematographer, on a single surface, as if they were projected. Patients say that it implements or eliminates, if necessary, thoughts and feelings from their minds using waves or radiation of mysterious origin, which they cannot explain, given their limited knowledge of physics. They usually talk about a “suggestive apparatus”, whose construction is indescribable, but each and every one of them can clearly state the machine’s primary function: transmission of thought and feeling from one side and their “suction” on the other side, where they mention one or two sleuths who operate the machine. The machine of their madness produces loco motor phenomena, causes erectile dysfunction with uncontrolled ejaculation, which patients claim to be aimed at exhausting their power, to cause weakness and fatigue. Also, they mention different types of waves that transmit the suggestions: air, electric, magnetic, radio waves and other sorts of waves they had read about or could not know about because they were discovered after the patients died. Phenomena induced by thoughts which are, in turn, manipulated by the machine are unfathomable and alien even to the patients themselves sometimes, as if they did not belong to their bodies, and there is a mechanical stranger who came crawling out of the cracks at the borders of their human identity, a stranger that lay dormant for all this time, waiting to finally take full control.
As with all other Viktor’s schizophrenic patients, Natalija’s identity was unstable, osmotic to the very limits: it could be shaped like dough, populated by crumbs of sensation, events and casual encounters, and yes, this was precisely why Viktor thought there was a slim, theoretical chance to help her recuperate a normal human ability to separate inner from outer reality, even if it required “lending” her some of his strength, some of his “I”. Freud would have never agreed to that. Viktor felt the urge to oppose the figure of the Great Master, but never lost his respect for him; Freud’s fatherly authority surpassed even the bitter disappointment after Freud flatly refused to analyse him personally and handed him over to the inexperienced Helene Deutsch, who had entered “the sacred circle” not two years before. As if the circle of followers of the Great Master had worn out in an incestuous series of mutual psychoanalysis, so instead of being broadened by new ideas, it shrunk and became devoid of creative energy. It lost all effect in a simple mechanism of establishing or dismantling authority, a banal combination of professional jealousy and personal insecurity, painful, pathological need to open people up on a routine basis to see what is inside, and to bravely offer your mind to be dissected, like an old tin of soup that had to be opened with a knife, in a time before tin-openers. There would always be a small blood red smear on the knife; both the real knife and the psychoanalytical one, used to cut souls. The blood red innards marinated through centuries in our damned and awfully exhausted souls do not spill over or smear the blade which has wounded us: the technology holds the key to many things.
How terribly misguided are the people who think that the way we perceive ourselves is as pure as virgin snow and completely independent from technological development. The fact that the findings we obtain from dissecting our own bodies, brains and feelings are equally devastating, even hopelessly sad – does not change anything – technology participates in the human need for self–delusion, brings it to the forefront and perfects it – Tausk wrote. The ultimate recognition of the human position in the universe will be entirely synchronized with mechanisms of death. They will make the blood invisible. Who knows, maybe the casualties of the last war of our future will die of a muderless weapon, a mind–manipulating machine, his notes on Natalija A.’s case read.