Pour une distinction de la machine à influencer et de l’objet autistique

While research on autism continues to progress, it is interesting to return to a particular point of view on the conception of Mahler and Elkisch's pathology, including the controversial assumption which was to consider some autistic constructions as preliminary to the development of the ‘Influencing Machine’. Consideration of the cas princeps of Tausk, in association with the more detailed Haslam, Porter and Williams, allows a demonstration of the function of these machines within the mental processes of the subjects presented. This subjective work engages the subjects to find the cause of bodily manifestations and hallucinations while delirious. The response is to blame ‘Influencing Machines’ considered by the subject as driven by an autonomous dynamic system linked to a participating elementary phenomena of psychosis. Gradually the conclusion is reached that there is a machine and this signifies the systematization of psychotic delirium as a result of mental automatism. Different to this, the autistic machine is the result of knowledge that comes from an elaboration trying to compensate for the absence of the symbolic function. While the friends of the psychotic are subject to the same punishment as him, the autistic person is the only one driven by the machines he imagines. Their functioning in connections come to affect the enigma of the body, libidinal function and distinction with the Other. It is a question of created machines, controlled by the autistic person, unlike the delusions of machines by the psychotic subject, where the initiation and execution come from the Other, and which therefore exert an influence on the subject.