ABSTRACT
The schizophrenic influencing machine is a machine of mystical nature. The patients are able to give only vague hints of its construction. Clinical psychiatry explains the symptom of an influencing machine as analogous to the ideas of persecution in paranoia, and calls it "paranoia somatica". The symptom with the content that "thoughts are given to them", the patients deduce subsequently from their belief that others know their thoughts. The developmental stage that precedes the stage of object finding has been recognized as that of identification. The projection of one's body may, then, be traced back to the developmental stage in which one's own body is the goal of the object finding. The regression of libido to the early infantile stage determines the re-transformation of the meanwhile genitally centralized libido into the pregenital stage, in which the entire body is a libidinal zone—in which the entire body is a genital.
