ABSTRACT
This paper sits in the long shadow cast by two supremely important psychoanalytic essays, each of which – Sam Gerson’s “When the Third Is Dead” (2009) and Viktor Tausk’s “On the Origin of the ‘Influencing Machine’ in Schizophrenia” (1933) – lies in the shadow of war and destructiveness on an overwhelming scale. While I have been working on the theoretical and clinical dimensions of these papers for a quite a long time, I again learned, in this last reworking, how melancholy and despair so dominate these projects. So I am writing now in an uncertain relation to the question of how and whether we can, collectively or individually, quell ghosts, repel the machine, or weather the marks of history. I will draw on a clinical case haunted by ghosts and technologies recruited to tumult and disequilibrium in which analyst and analysand were captured in the mesh of various machines.
