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The Greek man of antiquity accepted proudly, happily and joyfully, his body and his mind. It did not occur to him, in spite of his great scientific knowledge, to project parts of his body or mind upon lifeless machines—which he used only sparingly, if at all. A schizophrenic person of modern times suffers under the weight and guilt of his narcissistic involvement, which the Greek accepted so gracefully. To solve his problem the schizophrenic patient projects parts of his internalized tensions and anxiety onto the outer world, where he then feels persecuted by hellish machines.
In between stands the prototype of the contemporary man—the engineer. He has lost the happy narcissism of antiquity. He has also freed himself from excessive medieval Christian repression of his body and the pleasure he receives from it. The engineer, therefore, feels ready to project parts of his human functions onto his environment and he finds delight in delegating a great part of body and mind upon the outer world, where he calls it the machine. Most recently, he does not especially mind delegating the proudest function of being human, his intelligence, upon the new thinking machine. It can think better than any human brain, no matter how mathematically gifted the human may be.
Modern man has projected and recreated the images of his body and of his unconscious onto the machine. He has done this with ease and grace—until the machine began to threaten him, his dominance and his master position.
Modern man created around himself inventions of his conscious and unconscious mind and gets great satisfaction from his machines. Where the vision of his eyes comes to an end, he invented the electronic eye and called it television. When he came to the limits of his hearing, he invented the radio and the telephone. His energy assumed the power of any god in antiquity, and no demon of Greek mythology could match the destructive power of the atomic age. What the proud person of antiquity tried to achieve