Tausk, Viktor
TAUSK, VIKTOR
TAUSK, VIKTOR (1877–1919), Austrian psychiatrist, and one of Sigmund *Freud's early pupils. Tausk, already a judge in Croatia, went to Vienna in 1908 to study medicine and psychiatry. He became a member of the group around Freud, and in spite of his involvement in the dissension in the group, Freud had a high opinion of him. In 1914 Tausk read a paper on melancholia to a meeting of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society. As an army psychiatrist in World War i he used psychoanalytic methods in the treatment of war neuroses. In 1918 he returned to Vienna, where Freud refused to psychoanalyze him himself and arranged for his analysis by one of his pupils, Helene Deutsch. The treatment was not a success and shortly after Tausk committed suicide.
Tausk published a number of papers in 1913–14 on infantile sexuality and dreams. His outstanding contribution was in the psychoanalytic interpretation of schizophrenia which he published in 1919, Ueber die Entstehung des "Beeinflussungsapparates" in der Schizophrenia ("On the Origin of the 'Influencing Machine' in Schizophrenia," 1933). In 1991 a collection of his psychoanalytical papers was published in English as Sexuality, War, and Schizophrenia.
bibliography:
P. Roazen, Brother Animal: The Story of Freud and Tausk (1969); K.R. Eissler, Talent and Genius: The Fictitious Case of Tausk contra Freud (1971).
[Louis Miller /
Elisabeth Dessauer (2nd ed.)]