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Because of the tragic circumstances surrounding Victor Tausk's untimely death in 1919, he has not been accorded his proper place in the history of psychoanalysis. A man of great versatility, a poet and a writer, a lawyer as well as a physician and a psychoanalyst, Tausk was one of Freud's most brilliant early pupils. When Lou Andreas-Salomé entered Freud's world in 1912, she ranked Tausk 'the most prominently outstanding' among Freud's students.1 Freud's three-page obituary of Tausk was the lengthiest Freud ever penned. 'He is sure of an honorable memory', Freud proclaimed, 'in the history of psychoanalysis and its earliest struggles'.2
Born in Slovakia on March 12, 1879, Tausk was initially trained as a lawyer. After separating from his wife, he tried to earn his living as a journalist in Berlin. Then in the fall of 1908, Tausk went to Vienna to study medicine, already planning to become a psychoanalyst. Freud helped him from the outset, by sending him patients and lending him money. Unlike Freud and most of his medical followers, Tausk chose to become a psychiatrist. He became the first member of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society to try to apply Freud's concepts to the understanding of the psychoses. Tausk's paper on the 'influencing machine' has become a classic in the psychological understanding of schizophrenia, and his concept of 'ego boundaries' has been developed in modern psychotherapy by Paul