2002

A Joint Presentation With The Michigan Society for Psychoanalytic Psychology

PARANOIAC VISIONS AND NEO-REALITIES IN THE RECENT CINEMA: 

Reflections on Tausk's "Influencing Machine in Schizophrenia" 

By  David L. Downing, Psy.D.

These films express compelling, derivative visions of de-centeredness from one's subjective moorings, and psychical collapse into psychosis.  As such, the images and encoded struggles they embody provide vicarious contact with and knowledge of processes, which are incapable of naming, as the experiences exist outside of the semiotic provisions of language.   The pre-verbal existence is infantile, ruled by impulse and instinct.  As Freud cogently observed on this quality of the Id/System Unconscious:  "We call it a Chaos".  Thus, its fate is to be negated, repressed, disavowed, by its very nature incapable of representation, or knowing. Thus, warded-off, unthinkable processes become, paradoxically, even more attractive, if even in a repellant fashion.  [Counter-phobic as well as sadistic-masochistic trends are well-in-evidence in the phenomena of cinematic- and television-watching - and are especially extant in relation to films embodying such primitive material.]  Such processes are concretized in symbolical images where they can gain access to the conscious ego.  Such representations, like the manifest content of dreams, become the vehicles for conveying, in a modified and more organized fashion, a dissolution of the Self and social order (the holding-in-the-environment and container for the Self) that reflects the increasingly unfiltered, un-neutralized expressions of aggressive and sexual drives extant in the culture-at-large. 

Victor Tausk's (1919) paper, On the Origin of the "Influencing Machine" in Schizophrenia addresses the paranoiac phenomenological realm depicted in these films quite eloquently (and uncannily, given the date of its composition). While each of the films contain, at one level, a higher-order psychical conflict that can be conceptualized as Oedipal (with the most interesting exception of the film Iron Man, that dispenses with anything remotely genital phase), with the protagonists eventually rising up against and overcoming a malevolent and destructive masculine force/imago (and acquiring a female romantic partner), the more compelling drama is in the unmasking of the un-reality of the lived-in world.  In each of the films, the "real" is a construction that people unwittingly inhabit as veritable somnambulists.

Here, The Truman Show is a variant, in that only Truman is completely unawares that all others are co-conspirators and voyeurs.  All goings-on are subject to the scrutiny and control of powerful controllers/watchers. Even in The Truman Show, actors' actions are completely scripted and choreographed.  They too, albeit more "wittingly", are constantly monitored and controlled.  However, in Dark City and The Matrix, not only is the surround constructed, and inhabitants' actions choreographed, everyone is unawares of their "imaginary" existence.  Tellingly, with Dark City and The Truman Show, there is not only a figurative, but a literal, "end-of-the-world" that demarcates the boundary of being/non-being - though this may get equated with existential questions of freedom/knowing/madness vs enslavement/ignorance/sanity.  Psychologically primal issues of inner/outer, me/not-me, being/non-being are conflated, such that, much like the "language" of the unconscious, a "thing" simultaneously represents itself and its opposite.  Indeed, the Heroes' capacity to overcome their predicament rests largely on being able to acquire the powers of the destructive Other (while somehow miraculously not succumbing to becoming the Other - again, the exception being Iron Man, where the people do become machines themselves, much more in keeping with Tausk and the "dissolving" of the patients her describes).

Importantly, each of the imaginary, constructed worlds constitutes an "influencing machine", uncannily like that described by Victor Tausk (1919) in his classic paper on certain delusional aspects to be found in some schizophrenic patients.  The machines construct entire lives, dwellings, thoughts, emotions, etc, in a perverse guest-host manner.  That is, the machine, and the presence/operators both behind and of the machine are feeding on the emotions, energy, and "souls" of the human subjects who are, almost entirely, unconscious of their "true" state of affairs and consequent fate.  Indeed, knowledge of the machine and "seeing" the "real" can be fatal or maddening.  This is because all of the "givens" of consensually-validated reality are un-real, utter fabrications.  Yet, at the same time, this is all that the subject "knows" and, therefore, "is".   Thus, the subject/object is incapable of any action or knowing that rises beyond the contingencies and predictions of the program or context that locates, names, brackets, precedes, and "causes" them. In this regard, again in keeping with Tausk's observations of schizophrenics so afflicted, the subjects are, in essence, becoming part of, merged with, the machines themselves, little by little. [Unlike Tausk's patients, however, the filmic inhabitants of these circumscribed worlds are not even "well" enough to become paranoid, almost without exception.  If the veil of disguise is pierced, madness or some form of silencing, including death (eg, suicide, execution), occurs to the "messenger".]  This is the equivalent of the disintegration of the Ego, and the loss of object ties we see in the  psychoses.  The films affront the viewer with a simple, but no less alarming, psychoanalytic maxim: the conscious "I" is not the master of the Self.  In fact, the "I" may not even be the locus of the Self.   The films de-center human activity from the position of authorship and volition that we assume to be in place.  In effect, they assert to the viewer (who is also, in turn, simultaneously subject and object, voyeur and viewed, of the imaginal projection on the screen) that "Everything You Know Is Wrong". The paper will be accompanied by clips from the films so as to illustrate key points.

This presentation works within the integrative tradition of applied psychoanalysis as pioneered by Sigmund Freud in such papers as The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming; The Theme of the Three Caskets; The Moses of Michelangelo; and others. Neo-realities in the Recent Cinema notes a current thematic trend, that, it is suggested, embodies disquieting intra-psychical dilemmas with which individuals are increasingly pre-occupied; and accordingly, are increasingly projected onto the stage of the world-at-large (including projective spheres, for discharge where they can be vicariously sampled, explored, and dismissed). The sampled films express derivative visions of de-centeredness from one’s subjective moorings, and psychical collapse into psychosis. As such, the images & encoded struggles they embody provide vicarious contact with processes which are incapable of being named, as the experiences exist outside of the semiotic provisions of language. Much like the psychoanalytical enterprise itself, the paper attempts to explore sectors of experience where reason is not welcome. 

ABOUT THE PRESENTER: David L. Downing, Psy.D. is the Director of Clinical Training and Professor at the Illinois School of Professional Psychology/Chicago Northwest. He received his doctorate from Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio; and received his certificate in psychoanalysis from the Center for Psychoanalytic Study in Chicago. He is the Past-President and current Treasurer of the Chicago Open Chapter for the Study of Psychoanalysis (Section IV, Local Chapters, APA Division of Psychoanalysis [39]); Charter Treasurer of the International Federation for Psychoanalytic Education; and the Secretary of the Chicago Circle Association (a Chicago Psychoanalytical Society associated with the Ecole de Freudien du Quebec). Dr Downing has written and presented on theoretical and treatment vicissitudes related to severe psychopathology, as well as applied psychoanalysis. He maintains a private practice in psychoanalysis, psychoanalytical psychotherapy, and supervision in Chicago and Rolling Meadows, Illinois.