This little paper was written for a special purpose, a reminder of the darker side of unconscious (and conscious) fantasies in all people. The paper deliberately focuses on the beliefs of the wild and independent physician, Georg Groddeck, who Freud admired and supported, despite the opposition of a number of other analysts during the 'twenties and first two years of the 'thirities. The paper is self-explanatory. It was written for the Journal of the Philadelphia Association for Psychoanalysis, 1979, Vol. 6: 175-181. I am glad to be able to reproduce it here without changes except those having to do with copy-editing and the addition of Endnotes to bring it up to the 1997 date.

Every strong medicine needs an antidote, at least a buffer. Courses on psychotheories – abstractions of the mind’s workings in general or the ways the mind develops – are strong medicine. When theory becomes preoccupation unto itself, the best antidotes are clinical observations made doing psychoanalysis. To a lesser extent, it also helps to turn to the writings of those few colleagues besides Freud who can both see into the depths and convey what they see.

Georg Groddeck is such a writer, and his The Book of the It has been regularly assigned in the fourth year theoretical classes in the New Orleans Psychoanalytic Institute. In the midst of the defenders and antagonists of ego psychology, the systematizers and revisers, the deliverers of messages from psychology, neurophysiology, philosophy, linguistics, electrical engineering, General Systems Theory, Biology, and the lot, Groddeck deserves a place. His place is not that of a systematic theorist (he ridiculed that notion), nor as a self-proclaimed "wild analyst." Rather, he is a passionate and amused witness who reminds us of those fantasies and acts most private in people, having to do with the life of the body – those experiences most childlike, most id-like. After all, the life of the id is as central to the psychoanalytic enterprise as the life of the ego and superego. 

And if I were to devise a course specifically on psychoanalytic developmental theory, Groddeck’s writings would be there too. Professional developmental observers, usually operating outside the home and often not even knowing the mothers very well, tend to present us with children who seem somehow too nice, too naïve, too vulnerable, too reasonable, too clean, too blameless. Their very sexuality seems chaste. Such children may be (ever "understandably" – according to the professional observers) "impulsive". Ordinary parents would be apt to call them, simply, "bad." Except for Kleinian analysts and people like Winnicott who were strongly influenced by Klein, not many analysts remark about the deadly serious nature of the aims of such children. This too is understandable: other analysts are apt to treat older children and adults -- in a sense these are public lives being publicly observed. Groddeck’s children are altogether a spicier lot. Reconstructed out of the his own memories and those of his patients, we recognize in them, instantly, our patients, our children and ourselves as experienced privately.

For some years it was not easy to find English translations of Groddeck’s works, and even today most are out of print. But in 1976 a new edition of The Book of the It appeared, which included a fine introduction by Lawrence Durrell.¹ And 1977 saw the publication of a selection of his writings along with correspondence with Freud, beautifully edited by Lore Schacht. The student’s lot is now easier.

Georg Groddeck spent half his life in the nineteenth century, half in the twentieth. Born in 1866, ten years after Freud, he died in 1934 in Switzerland, soon after fleeing the Gestapo. Shortly before that, he had sent an obscene telegram to the newly elected Hitler. He was a general practitioner of fiercely independent mind and unusually wide philosophical and literary interests. He loved and scoffed at his calling -- the essential quality of being a physician, he said, was "a propensity for cruelty which has been just so far suppressed as to be useful, and which has as its warder the dread of causing pain" (p. 4).

Groddeck was a pupil of Schweninger, Bismarck’s personal physician. Schweninger saw the doctor as merely a catalyst to set off a therapeutic process. But Groddeck had his own style: "Nearly as great as my aversion to the surgeon’s bloody trade is my dislike of the assorted poisons of the pharmacopoeia, and so I came to massage and to mental treatment; these are both not less cruel, but they adapt themselves better to any particular man’s desire to suffer" (p. 5).

Probing more and more into his patients’ minds, he uncovered the basic principles of symbolization, resistance, and transference, although he did not then label them as such. In fact, he wrote an article in 1912 rather harshly criticizing psychoanalysis; the article was written without the benefit of much knowledge, an attack "launched from a position of prophetic envy, so to speak" (Groddeck, 1977, p. 32). In 1913 he began to read Freud’s works seriously. Reluctantly but forthrightly – for he was simultaneously proud of originality and honesty – he thereafter called himself a disciple of Freud’s.

Yet he was by no means a slavish disciple. Before learning about psychoanalysis, he had come to the conclusion that men may believe they are living their own lives, but the are actually "lived" by an unconscious "something," a great force, the mystery of life, called "Gottnature" by Goethe. Because it was ineffable – in fact a fiction, he said, merely a way of thinking about man – Groddeck found it convenient to borrow the term "It" from Nietzsche. Consciousness, the ego, the self, physical illness, neurotic symptoms, and the great or vile works of man were basically manifestations of the It. The It was protean, could divide up, work one portion against others, experiment, build up, be playful, be destructive – finally destructive unto death.

The task for the physician in all illnesses (for Groddeck did not believe in the separation of the organic from the mental) was to gain access by any means to the patient’s It, to influence it in its ways. He himself sought access through the use of diet and massage, and in the process of interpreting symbol, transference, and resistance. But the actual process of cure remained, as he admitted over and over, unknown.

Freud received his first letter from Groddeck in 1917, a long and curious missive full of self-revelations and clinical examples. Intrigued, charmed, amused, Freud answered, "I understand that you are requesting me urgently to supply you with an official confirmation that you are not a psychoanalyst . . .Obviously I am doing you a service if I push you away. . . Yet I cannot do this; I have to claim you, I have to assert that you are a splendid analyst who has understood forever the essential aspects of the matter. The discovery that transference and resistance of the most important aspects of treatment turns a person irretrievably into a member of the wild army. No matter if he calls the unconscious "it" (Groddeck, 1977, p. 36).

Freud, in his delineation of what would become known as the structural theory, acknowledged his debt to Groddeck, but agreed to the translation into English of Das Es into the word, Id (1923, p.23). (See, Spruiell, 1981a, VS81a). But privately he cautioned from the beginning that there was no need to extend the concept of the dynamic unconscious into philosophical and mystical realms.² The differences about the translation of Das Es into "It" for Groddeck and "Id" for Freud persisted. Despite these cautious distinctions, and despite Groddeck’s independence, Freud never lost a close interest in him.

Freud, reasonable, weighed down by responsibilities and leadership, loyal to the scientific version of rationality of his time, mindful of the future, cautious of his own flights of fantasy, perhaps envied Groddeck’s freedom. In 1925 he wrote, "Everything from you is interesting to me, even if I may not follow you in detail. I do not, of course, recognize my civilized, bourgeois, demystified Id in your It. Yet you know that mine derived from yours" (Groddeck, 1977, p. 93). And to Pfister, who, like others, attacked Groddeck, Freud wrote, "I energetically defend Groddeck against your respectability. What would you have said if you had been a contemporary of Rabelais?" (p. 6). Groddeck was a kind of anti-rationalist poet and philosopher, a sort of holy fool; Freud, unlike men of narrower minds, could cherish him.

As a devoted follower of ego psychology and the developmental point of view,³ I believe Groddeck serves a function in reintroducing us to the excitement, terrors, richness, comedies, tragedies, earthiness, and joyfulness of the private worlds of conscious and unconscious fantasy. After all, should not our theories subsume these matters too? In fact, I believe he reintroduces us to the very qualities that fascinated most of us about psychoanalysis in the first place. The Book of the It is rich with examples of universal unconscious fantasies from childhood – precisely those private fantasies and acts that the public observer and the private parent is apt to miss ("mothers really understand very little about their children" [p. 25]).

Groddeck was a lifelong enfant terrible, an insouciant purveyor of shocking home truths. With what joe de vivre does he celebrate everything about infantile sexuality! With what glee puncture the pretensions of hypocrites! With what satisfaction does he announce the certainty – the necessity – that we all contain hatefulness, malice, spite, envy, vanity, and murder. Mother-love, yes, but mother-hate too. "Listen, I am convinced that the child gets born through hatred" (p. 35). Hatred is as valid and necessary as love – as Freud (1915) had pointed out. Blood, excrement, semen – Groddeck celebrates them. He smells what is to be smelled, tastes what is to be tasted. He never lets up on the ruthlessness of his own self-analysis.

Bisexuality? Groddeck, like Freud, insists on its universality. Sadomasochism? exhibitionism, scopophilia? "The truth is that the exhibitionist is in the same class as all those other people labeled with the final ‘-ist,’ with the sadist, the masochist, the fetishist. They are in essence the same as ourselves who call ourselves healthy. The sole difference is that we allow our desires to play only where custom permits, where the ‘-ist’ is out of date" (p. 218).

Masturbation? The mother herself gives the child instruction in masturbation," (by the intimacies exchanged through handling, changing diapers, bathing, etc.) "(She) is obliged to do so (p. 53). But the mother also then forbids it, punishes it. As a consequence, "in large measure, our human world, our culture, was certainly founded on masturbation. And masturbation finally returns, center stage, as the solace for the aged.

Parricide? The oedipal struggles? Castration anxiety? Penis envy? Admitted with tolerance, often with pleasure. All, as Freud knew, are parts of infantile sexuality. None ever renounced, only recognized. Everything human is Groddeck’s province – and he must talk about it. Even his own exhibitionism is taken for granted, with irony.

But he is as willing to face pain as pleasure, to appreciate the ubiquity of guilt and ambivalence, craven fears, the poignancy of loss, the submission to the fate of the unconscious. The craving for pain? "Cruelty is indissolubly linked with love, and red blood is the deepest enchantment for red love" (p.124). For punishment? "And then you come to me with foolishness that children should not be punished? Ah . . . but the child wants to be punished, he yearns for it, he pants for a beating" (p. 123). The talion law always prevails – "the life of man is ruled by the law, ‘as thou to me, so I to thee’" (p. 8). And as for narcissism, "I am what the learned call a narcissist. Narcissism plays a great role in men’s lives. If I had not possessed it to so high a degree, I should not have become what I am" (p. 261).

Groddeck does not allow himself (or us) the balms of ordinary amenities. "Watch anyone when he thinks he is alone; at once you see the child come to the surface, sometimes in very comical fashion. He yawns, or without embarrassment, he scratches his head or his bottom, or he picks his nose, or even – yes, it has got to be said – he lets out wind. The daintiest lady will do so!" (p. 16). 

"All these phenomena can be laid bare by the process of free association, by the recognition of the symbol, by understanding dreams. The dream is the speech of the unconscious [p. 37].). By recognizing the ubiquity of resistance and transference. But the laying bare does not produce final answers, and the nature of the unconscious is only barely comprehensible, only partly bearable to comprehend. What a toilsome business it is to speak about the Id. One plucks a string at hazard, and there comes the response, not of a single note, but of many, confusedly mingling and dying away again, or else awakening new echoes, and ever new again, until such an ungoverned medley of sounds is raging that the stammer of speech is lost. Believe me, one cannot speak about the unconscious, one can only stammer, or rather, one can only point out this and that with caution, lest the hell brood of the unconscious world should rush up out of the depths with their wild clangor" (p. 33).

Groddeck’s children are simply reflections of our most intimate and secret selves – no more and no less. We know about these children because we know about ourselves and our patients. "Life begins with childhood, and by a thousand devious paths through maturity attains its single goal, once more to be a child, and the one and only difference between people lies in the fact that some grow childish and childlike" (p. 16).

Our knowledge takes us back with confidence only to the reaches of verbal memory, only sometimes into the third year, perhaps rarely a bit earlier. Nevertheless, "In the mind of a three-year-old child there are processes at work which though extremely involved, have a certain unity at the source" (p. 12). Those first years, as the later ones, still live in the unconscious. Of course we are all aware that the reconstruction of development based solely on adult analyses is full of pitfalls. Everybody knows that fantasies are often mistaken for deeds. Notwithstanding distortions, adult memory brings back not merely data from which we may reconstruct abstract developmental lines, not singular aspects of drives or object relations, not merely this or that dimension of cognition or affect. Memory brings back the wholeness of psychic life and the deep structure underlying the observable.

Psychic events from the (insecurely dated) earliest times must be inferred from observations made within the introspective field, just as the developmentalist infers intrapsychic events from (more securely dated) external behavior. In either case, the observer fantasies about the behavior he observes. Depending on how free his fantasy is, some things can be guessed about the interior life of the child.

The fact is, psychoanalysis needs both kinds of observations and needs to try to integrate the guesses. In emphasizing the difference in observations made within the introspective field from those observations made outside, I do not wish to slight the extraordinarily valuable psychoanalytic developmental researches of the past three decades -–any more than I would advocate theoretical return from an ego psychological to an id point of view. But it is impossible to believe that Freud intended the ego to replace the id, or that he intended psychoanalysis to move away from the recognition that humans of any age live in conflict, preoccupied with events having to do with self and cognition, untrammeled by the vicissitudes of drives, of infantile sexuality and aggression.

For all the helpfulness that increasingly sophisticated observations of infants and mothers (and, surely someday, fathers), the interpretation of these observations, and even the "set" to delineate them, will depend on what we are able to learn about humans from the psychoanalysis of adults. It is hoped that developmentalists at the very least will have been analyzed themselves and will continue their self-analyses. Better, it is to be hoped that those developmentalists who are qualified will continue to devote a major part of their professional lives to the adult patients.

Freud was right in refusing to shun Groddeck. For all his philosphical, mystical, and religious inclinations, he was not in the least interested in seeking "followers," much less in founding a "school." But he was original. In his writings he says, "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" (p. 25).

Groddeck, then, is not a replacement, not a savant, not to be believed in all things. His worth, instead, is as an antidote to the tendency to forget human mystery in our theories and as an antidote to the unending proclivities to evade, by way of repression and denial, the lusts, aggressions, conflicts, and, let it be said, the complexities of our children in their earliest years.

ENDNOTES

1. All quotations, unless otherwise noted, are from that translation.

2. Freud obviously did not want to acknowledge his debt, like Groddeck’s, to Nietzsche. As for mysticism and religion, Groddeck was, in fact, a Christian mystic.

3. Nowadays, I would say that I have not changed in interests, but view ego psychology more broadly, and more in depth, than I did in 1979 (see Loewald, 1970). I am still interested in ego psychology and the developmental point of view, but more interested in their relations with change – as in Process, or Organismic Theory.

REFERENCES

FREUD, S. (1915). Instincts and their vicissitudes. S.E., 19:12-66.

-------------- (1923). The ego and the id. S.E., 19:12-66.

GRODDECK, G. (1976). The Book of the It. New York: International Univ. Press.

LOEWALD, H. (1970). Psychoanalytic theory and psychoanalytic process. In Papers on Psychoanalysis, pp. 277-301. New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

SPRUIELL, V. (1981). The self and the ego. Psychoanal. Q. 50:319-344. VS81a.