Word: groddeck
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...Book of the It has more than historical alue. In his whimsically disorganized discussions of symbolism, and society, Groddeck offers insights often as fresh today as they were in 1923; and his philosophical acceptence of ambivalence betrays a creative and critcal intelligence one rarely finds in psychoanalysis...
...GRODDECK breaks down the distinction between "mental" and "organic" diseases, both of which he calls manifestations of an It under conflict. "I am forever asking of my patients the purpose of their illness, (which) has to resolve the conflict, to repress it, or to prevent what is already repressed from entering consciousness." By discovering what patients did not wish to smell, Groddeck claims to have cured their colds. Yet he takes a modest view of his curative power, for "the success of the treatment is not determined by what we prescribe, but by what the It of the sick...
...analysis of symbol formation in dreams and from free associations. Symbolism belongs to the It (as it does to the Freudian Id), and thoughtful insights into examples of individual and cultural symbols such as the bisexuality of Christ on the Cross spice the entire book. More important for us, Groddeck brings to light some striking instances of symbolic symptom construction that modern psychoanalytic theory seems to have neglected...
When we add to Groddeck's postulate that the It creates everything human the proposition that it is a distortion for a society to distinguish between sick and healthy, we arrive at his radical critique of culture. The prevailing ideas of society, he writes, rationalize the sickness of the majority while emphasizing the neuroses of the minority: "The exhibitionist is in the same class as all those other people labeled with the final 'ist,' the sadist, the masochist, the fetichist. They are in essence the same as ourselves, who call ourselves healthy; the sole difference is that we allow...
...only since I began to occupy myself with analysis that I have realized how beautiful life is," he writes. To gain some appreciation of Groddeck's kind of beauty, you need but follow your It to the corner bookstore...