Georg Groddeck
Georg Groddeck (1866–1934) was a German physician who originated the concept of das Es — “the It” — the impersonal psychic force that Freud adopted and renamed “the Id” in The Ego and the Id (1923). Working from a spa clinic in Baden-Baden rather than from a university or institute, Groddeck arrived at psychoanalytic insights independently through clinical experience and then wrote to Freud in 1917 requesting that Freud confirm he was not a psychoanalyst. Freud refused: “I must lay claim to you and must state that you are a splendid psychoanalyst, whose thorough understanding of the essence of the matter is permanent.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) Groddeck’s central work, The Book of the It (1923), presented his ideas as thirty-three fictional letters from a character named “Patrik Troll,” mixing clinical observation, sexual frankness, and speculative philosophy in a style that resisted systematic formulation. He created no school, published no treatise, and quarreled with no one — which largely explains why the man who gave Freud one of his most famous concepts remained obscure for decades after his death.
Training Under Schweninger
Groddeck’s medical formation was shaped by Ernst Schweninger, Bismarck’s personal physician, under whom he trained and took his M.D. in 1889.(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) Groddeck later described his father as “a heretic in medicine; he was his own authority, went his own ways, right or wrong, and showed no respect for science either in word or in deed.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923)
The It (Das Es)
Groddeck’s central concept was the It — an unknown force that directs both what a person does and what happens to them. “I hold the view that man is animated by the Unknown, that there is within him an ‘Es,’ an ‘It,’ some wondrous force which directs both what he himself does and what happens to him. The affirmation ‘I live’ is only conditionally correct, it expresses only a small and superficial part of the fundamental principle ‘Man is lived by the It.’”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923)
The It encompassed “the physical, mental, spiritual, the organism with all its forces, the microcosmos which is a man.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) Groddeck was explicit that this was not a metaphysical truth claim but a working tool: “the It-hypothesis I regard not as a truth … but as a useful tool in work and in life.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923)
Freud acknowledged in The Ego and the Id (1923) that he owed the concept to Groddeck, who in turn had taken it from Nietzsche.(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) [GAP: The claims that Freud’s adoption narrowed the concept and that Groddeck’s It was holistic while Freud’s Id became a component of a tripartite psyche are not supported by the cited card.]
Disease as Expression
The most radical consequence of Groddeck’s It-hypothesis was his theory of disease. Diseases, he argued, “do not invade us as enemies from the outside, but are purposeful creations of our microcosmos, our It, just as purposeful as the structure of the nose and the eye.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) A being that could produce from spermatozoon and egg a complete human organism could also produce cancer, pneumonia, or a prolapsed womb — and did so for reasons the It found sufficient, though those reasons were rarely visible to consciousness.
This was a claim about the unity of mental and physical life, not about conscious intention. Groddeck did not argue that patients chose to be ill or that illness was a moral failing. He argued that the distinction between organic and functional disease was artificial — that the same unconscious processes shaped the growth of a tumor and the onset of a neurosis. The clinical implication was that the physician who treated only the body, ignoring the It’s purposes, was addressing the surface rather than the source.
Groddeck asserted that there has never been a miscarriage that was not brought about by the It on easily recognizable grounds, and described the mechanisms: “In its hatred, if this wins the mastery, the It compels the woman for this purpose to dance, to ride, or to travel, or to go to people who employ the kindly needle or probe”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923). He also argued that symbolic pregnancies and births “disappear without fail when the unconscious stimuli of this symbolic expression are revealed”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923).
The clinical anecdote Groddeck offered in Letter V gives the theory a concrete face. He describes treating a patient with a breech presentation by addressing her repressed anxieties about childbirth pain: “I set myself to inquire into her repressed complexes, of which I already knew a fair amount, and finally painted for her in glowing colors the pleasure of giving birth.” After Groddeck challenged her willingness to miss “the very highest pleasure of her life,” he reports receiving news the following day “that half an hour after my departure, the child was lying with the head underneath.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) Whether or not the account is clinically accurate by later standards, it reveals what the psychosomatic hypothesis demanded of the physician: not surgery or pharmacology but a conversation with the It through the patient’s conscious mind.
Repression, Symbolism, and Eros
Groddeck’s account of repression in Letter VI was more spatial than hydraulic. Where Freud often spoke of forces and counter-forces, Groddeck wrote that repressed material “does not vanish — it only loses its place. It is pushed into some corner or other where it has no right to be, where it is squeezed and hurt. Then it always stands on tiptoe, pressing from time to time with all its strength toward where it belongs.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) This image of repressed content as a displaced but persistent occupant (not annihilated but merely relocated and restless) gave the concept a quality that Freud’s more technical formulations sometimes obscured: the sense that the repressed retains both vitality and direction.
In Letter VII, Groddeck pressed the analysis of Eros into territory that was unusual even for psychoanalytic writing. He argued that sadism and masochism were not clinical aberrations but inescapable features of desire itself: “Everyone is a sadist, everyone a masochist; everyone by reason of his nature must wish to give and to suffer pain; to that he is compelled by Eros.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) The claim was not that most people have sadistic or masochistic tendencies but that the structure of pleasure itself requires both the giving and receiving of pain, and that the clinical categories of sadism and masochism described a universal condition rather than a minority deviation.
Relationship with Freud
Groddeck credited Freud: “Everything in them that sounds reasonable, or perhaps only a little strange, is derived from Professor Freud of Vienna and his colleagues; whatever is quite mad, I claim as my own spiritual property.”(Groddeck, Georg, 1923)
Makari’s account in Revolution in Mind (2008) places Groddeck within the broader problem of psychoanalytic identity — the recurring question of what made someone a psychoanalyst rather than merely a physician who used some Freudian ideas. Freud’s response to Groddeck’s 1917 letter was generous precisely because Groddeck posed no institutional threat: he wanted to be excluded, not included, and his clinical work in Baden-Baden was far from the organizational struggles in Vienna and Berlin.(Makari, George, 2008)
[GAP: The timing of a letter from Groddeck to Freud is significant.] Freud replaced the complex hermeneutics of dream interpretation with the analysis of transference, which he considered an empirically observable proof of the sexual nature of neurosis.(Makari, George, 2008) He told Jung that transference was “the chief proof that the whole process is sexual in nature.”(Makari, George, 2008) [GAP: Groddeck’s letter and his theory of disease, and how it related to Freud’s shift.] [GAP: The affinity Freud felt and the development of the It concept.]
Obscurity and Legacy
Groddeck wrote letters to Hitler protesting the anti-Semitic outrages of his regime, under the impression that Hitler was not personally responsible for these misdeeds.(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) Hitler’s reply to Groddeck was to order his arrest.(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) Warned in time, however, Groddeck escaped to Switzerland a fortnight after his second heart attack.(Groddeck, Georg, 1923)
His obscurity, as the introduction to his book explains, was a consequence of his temperament. He created no school, published no systematic treatise, avoided controversy, and preferred treating patients to building institutions.(Groddeck, Georg, 1923) The rehabilitation of psychosomatic thinking in the later twentieth century brought some renewed attention to his work, but Groddeck remains better known for what Freud took from him than for what he said himself.
Human Notes
See Also
Sources
All primary claims draw on:
- Groddeck, G. (1923). The Book of the It. New York: New American Library (Montagu introduction). [Source ID: groddeck-bookoftheIt-1923]
- Makari, G. (2008). Revolution in Mind: The Creation of Psychoanalysis. New York: HarperCollins. [Source ID: makari-revolutioninmind-2008]