GRODDECK, GEORG WALTHER (1866-1934)

A German physician and the director of a clinic in Baden-Baden, in the Black Forest region, Georg Walther Groddeck was born on October 13, 1866, in Bad Kösen an der Saale, Germany, and died on June 11, 1934, in Knonau bei Zürich, Switzerland. Groddeck detailed his upbringing in his autobiographical writings. A saying of his mother's, "Big ears mean great accomplishments," became his life motto. The youngest of five children in a family of aristocrats, he was educated at the school in Schulpforta where Gotthold Lessing, Otto Rank, and Friedrich Nietzsche also studied. He was a great admirer of Nietzsche and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, among others. He studied medicine with Ernst Schweninger, Otto von Bismarck's personal physician, in keeping with a Romantic tradition of medicine based on experience, in contrast to the scientific mindset of his era. As a result of his exceptionally powerful personality, Groddeck became a renowned doctor whom patients throughout Europe came to consult about somatic and psychosomatic illnesses. He initially used hydrotherapy, dietetics, massage therapy, and psychotherapy based on authority and the power of suggestion; he later refined this approach into a form of psychoanalytic-psychosomatic therapy.

In 1910, during a life crisis, he discovered the writings of Sigmund Freud, and he completed his self-analysis in the course of the 115 lectures on psychoanalysis that he delivered to patients in his clinic between 1916 and 1919. These lectures later became famous.

He began corresponding with Freud in 1917 and met him personally in 1920, at the international psychoanalytic congress in the Hague. Groddeck drew a mixed reception with his presentation at the congress, which he supposedly introduced by saying, "I am a wild psychoanalyst," and in which, associating freely, he spoke of his childhood enuresis. In 1920 he became a member of the Deutsche psychoanalytische Gesellschaft (German Psychoanalytic Society). But he did not fully integrate himself into the psychoanalytic movement, and he followed his own path whenever personal ties were important and institutional constraints bothersome. He took a skeptical view of the new ego psychology.

Throughout his life he remained involved in sociopolitical activist groups. He refused to accept the National Socialists' reining in of German psychoanalysts after 1933 and ran up against insurmountable problems with them. Finally, he had to take refuge in Switzerland.

In 1917 he put forward his psychoanalytic-psychosomatic agenda in Psychische Bedingtheit und psychoanalytische Behandlung organischer Leiden (Psychic determination and psychoanalytic treatment of organic disorders). Using examples from his clinical work and vignettes from his self-analysis, he described the relationship between somatic disorders and unconscious psychic processes. In 1921 he published Der Seelensucher: ein psychoanalytischer roman (The soul-seeker: a psychoanalytic novel), a humorous account of the adventures of a psychoanalytic Don Quixote. Groddeck considered this his best work, as did Freud; others complained that it was sexually indecent and unscientific. With the publication of the The Book of the It (1923/1928), Groddeck became famous. This was yet another extremely personal book: clinically oriented, spontaneous, unconventional. This work was followed by many lectures, articles in the journals Satanarium and Die Arche, and, in 1933, Der Mensch als Symbol: unmassgebliche Meinungen über Sprache und Kunst (Man as symbol: considerations, without pretension, on language and skills). Groddeck's correspondences with Freud and with Sándor Ferenczi are well known. Most of his works are available in translation in many languages.

Groddeck was important above all in psychoanalytic psychosomatics. He was the first to argue for the value of psychoanalysis in theorizing about the mind and for the treatment of not just conversion but all somatic disorders, which he supported with a large amount of clinical data. His work is still controversial because his method was neither rational nor scientifically rigorous. Instead, he followed the primary processes in both his therapeutic work and his writings. Using this way of thinking, which Hanns Sachs described as a "self-portrait of the unconscious," he presented psychoanalysis as an activity, not a theory. Drawing on Nietzsche and the critical philosophy of consciousness, he stressed the concept of the id, a concept that Freud took up, but in a modified form. (He advocated saying, "The id thinks in me," and not "I think.") He recognized the significance of regression, pre-oedipal desires, and maternal transference, and thus had an enormous influence on Ferenczi, with whom he became friends. He was also in contact with Ernst Simmel, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, and Michael Balint. The educated public and several writers (Lawrence Durrell and Ingeborg Bachmann, among others) took a great lay interest in his work, and the French psychoanalysts Roger Lewinter, Pierre Fédida, Jean-Bertrand Pontalis, Octave Mannoni, and François Roustang were receptive to his ideas for their scientific content.

Herbert Will

See also: AllgemeineÄrztliche Gesellschaft für Psychotherapie; Book of the It, The ; Germany; Id; Psychic causality; Psychosomatic.

Bibliography

Bos, Jaap. (1992). On the origin of the id (das Es ). International Review of Psychoanalysis, 19, 433-443.

Chemouni, Jacquy. (1984). Georg Groddeck, psychanalyste de l 'imaginaire: psychanalyse freudienne et psychanalyse groddeckienne. Paris: Payot.

Groddeck, Georg. (1917). Psychische Bedingheit und psychoanalytische Behandlung organischer Leiden. Leipzig: S. Hirzel.

——. (1928). The book of the it. Washington, DC: Nervous and Mental Disease Publishing Co. (Original work published 1923.)

——. (1933). Der Mensch als Symbol: unmassgebliche Meinungen über Sprache und Kunst. Leipzig: Internationaler psychoanalytischer Verlag.

——. (1951). The world of man (V. M. E. Collins, Trans.). New York: Funk & Wagnalls Co.

——. (1977). The meaning of illness: selected psychoanalytic writings (Gertrud Mander, Trans.). London: Hogarth Press.

Grossman, Carl M., and Grossman, Sylva. (1965). The wild analyst: the life and work of Georg Groddeck. New York: Braziller.

Grotjahn, Martin. (1966). Georg Groddeck: the untamed analyst. In Franz Alexander, Samuel Eisenstein, and Martin Grotjahn (Eds.), Psychoanalytic pioneers. New York: Basic Books, 1966.

Will, Herbert. (1987). Georg Groddeck: die Geburt der Psychosomatik. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag (dtv).

——. (1994). Ferenczi und Groddeck: eine Freundschaft. Psyche, 720-737.