The Book of the It

Georg Groddeck was a physician and writer regarded as a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine. Groddeck is often mistaken for an orthodox disciple of Sigmund Freud; indeed, he was perhaps the only analyst whose views had some effect on Freud. Freud mentions Groddeck in "The Ego and the Id," crediting him with giving a name to what Freud had already given a local habitation, to wit, the Id. The "Book of the It" is an unusual work in which each chapter is in the form of a letter to a girlfriend addressed as "my dear". Groddeck attempts to unlock Eros, the instinctual drive chained by conventions of society, and to show it to be the unknown life-force that animates man from womb to grave. It is, according to Groddeck, the basic sexual motivation that influences every aspect of individual personality. In understanding the "It", man frees himself to understand the inexplicable desires and the hidden impulses that guide his life.