She has practically nothing to report about the head

The patient is Miss Natalija A., thirty-one years old, formerly a student of philosophy. She has been completely deaf for a great number of years, due to an ulcer of the ear, and can make herself understood only be means of writing. She declares that for six and a half years she has been under the influence of an electrical machine made in Berlin, though this machine's use is prohibited by the police. It has the form of a human body, indeed, the patient's own form, though not in all detaisl. Her mother, likewise the patient's male and female friends, are also under the influence of this machine or of similar machines. Of the latter she gives no explanation, describing only the apparatus to which she herself is subjected. She is certain that for men there is a masculine machine representing the masculine form and for women a female one. The trunk (torso) has the shape of a lid, resembling the lid of a coffin and is lined with silk or velvet. Regarding the limbs two significant explanations are given. At the first interview she described thhm as entirely natural parts of the body. A few weeks later these limbs were not placed on the coffin lid in their natural form, but were merely drawn on it in two dimensions, in the position they would occupy in the natural state of the body. She cannot see the head---she says that she is not sure about it and she does not know whether the machine bears her own head. She has practically nothing to report about the head. The patient does not know definitely how this machine is to be handled, neither does she know how it is connected with her; but she vaguely thinks that it is by means of telepathy. The outstanding fact about the machine is that it is being manipulated by someone in a certain manner, and everything that occurs to it happens also to her. When someone strikes this machine, she feels the blow in the corresponding part of her own body. The ulcer (lupus) now present on her nose was first produced on the nose of the machine, and some time later the patient herself became afflicted with it. The inner parts of the machine consist of electric batteries, which are supposed to represent the internal organs of the human body. Those who handle the machine produce a slimy substance in her nose, disgusting smells, dreams, thoughts, feelings, and disturb her while she is thinking, reading, or writing. At an earlier stage, sexual sensations were produced in her through manipulation of the genitalia of the machine; but now the machine no longer possesses any genitalia, though why or how they disappeared she cannot tell. Ever since the machine lost its genitalia, the patient has ceased to experience sexual sensations.

. . . The peculiar construction of the macine substantiates our assumptions to a great extent, especially with regard to the significance of the machine as a projected symbol of the genitalia. We may add that the apparatus represents not only the patient's genitalia but obviously, her whole person. It represents the projection of the patient's body on to the outer world. At least, the following results are unquestionably obtained from the patient's report: the apparatus is distinguished above all by its human form, easily recognized despite many non-human characteristics. In form it resembles the patient itself, and she senses all manipulations performed on the apparatus in the corresonding parts of her own body and in the same manner. All effects and changes undergone by the apparatus take place simultaneously in the patient's body, and vice versa. Thus, the apparatus loses its genitalia following the patient's loss of her genital sensations; it had possessed genitalia for as long a period as her genital sensations had lasted.

Applying the technique of dream interpretation to this case, it may be said that the patient's inablity to provide any detailed description of the head of the apparatus, and especially her inability to decide whether it was her own head or not, proves conclusively that it is her own head. We know from analytic observations that the person not recognized ina dream is actually the dreamer himself.

. . . A further detail in the description of the apparatus---namely, that the lid is lined with silk or velvet---may substantiate this opinion. Women very frequently describe in such terms the feelings evoked by caressing their own skin. That the intestines appear in the form of batteries is only of slight significance here, although it will assume a profounder meaning later on. This superficial interpretation may be associated with the information given directly or indirectly to school children to the effect that the viscera resemble a very complicated machine. In our case the tendency seems to be towards a verbal interpretation of this infantile conception. This conclusion regarding its ontogeny is arrived at with the help of the description given by the patient of her influencing apparatus.

At the very beginning the patient reported that the limbs of the apparatus appeared in their natural form and position. Several weeks later, sh declared that the limbs were drawn on the lid. This is obviously a manifestation of the progressive distortion undergone by the apparatus, which, consequently, eventually loses all human characteristics and becomes a typical, unintelligible, influencing machine. First the genitalia, then the libms are eliminated in this process. The patient, to be sure is unable to report how the genitalia are removed. She states, however, that the limbs are removed in the following manner: they lose their three-dimensional human form and flatten to a two-dimensional plane. It would not have been surprising if after a lapse of several weeks, the patient had declared that the apparatus did not possess any limbs at all. Nor would it have been astonishing had she stated that the apparatus had never had any limbs. A failure to recall the developmental stages of the apparatus has obviously the same significance as that of forgetting the origin of dream pictures. It is not too bold a conclusion to draw that the offin lid of the machine is a product of such successive distortions and that originally it had represented a human being---namely, the patient herself.

Psychoanalytic experience brings to light the causative factors in such distortion. Underlying every distortion of a psychic phenomenon there is a defense mechanism which has as its aim the protection of the conscious ego against the appearance or reappearance of undisguised fantasies. The patient obviously seeks not to recognize herself in the influencing machine and therefore in self-protection she divests it of all human features; in a word, the less human the appearance of the delusion, the less does she recognize herself in it.

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