Four Arguments for The Elimination of Television

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Dr. Cowen described his patient's distortion of the very word "television" to "tell-a-vision." He felt this word distortion explained how she could fantasize that television was a "machine of infinite power which inexorably demands that ego alien material be told through it . . . " Cowen goes on to say, "The singling out of various instruments as the source of trouble is common in regressed states where projection is the predominant feature. With the advent of television it has become a frequent clinical feature."

Most mental institutions in this country now keep television sets operating during all waking hours to occupy their patients without a thought that this could possibly have a negative effect. Dr. Cowen does not mention whether he ever considered merely turning off the television set as the woman was asking.

In 1919, Dr. Viktor Tausk, a colleague of Freud's, wrote an amazing article called "On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia."

Tausk wrote that a significant number of patients described their problems as being caused by an "influencing machine" operated by alien forces. These aliens represented belief systems threatening to the patient's own and which were being forcibly implanted in the patient's mind.

The influencing machine usually has gigantic wheels, gears and other paraphernalia, Tausk says. It often has the ability to project pictures and invisible rays in some way capable of imprinting the brain. The pictures frequently emanate from a "small black box" and are flat, not three-dimensional, images. The machine and its emanations can produce feelings and thoughts in the victim, while removing other ones, according to Tausk, "by means of rays or mysterious forces which the patient's knowledge of physics is inadequate to explain. It creates sensations that in part cannot be described," says Tauak, "because they are strange to the patient himself, and that in part are sensed as electrical, magnetic or due to air-currents."

Soon, Tausk reports, the victim cannot distinguish information—feelings, thoughts, sensations, memories—that have been received from this "external" source from those that have been personally generated or are the result of personal experience and discovery.

Tausk's hypothesis, similar to Cowen's, is that patients create this machine fantasy as an outward manifestation of an internal confusion between the external and the internal worlds; the world of one's own thoughts and the concrete world outside the person.

This confusion has its roots in early childhood, Tausk says. At a certain age, a child seeks a reality beyond the parents, seeks to contact an outer world and so begins exploring. To the degree the child succeeds, it learns to integrate and process the wider world it has experienced. It can tell the difference between the impulses, images and experiences which are connected to the world outside, and those which are totally self-generated, floating, not rooted in the world. If the child has made this distinction, then the projections of his or her own mind can be distinguished and identified. This is sanity.

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