In these pages…

This is the Second Special Issue of the Clinical Sándor Ferenczi Conference, “Psychoanalysis and Psychosomatics: Mind, Body and the Bridge Between” which took place in Baden-Baden, Germany in August 2006. (See AJPA, 2007, #3 for the First Special Issue of the Baden-Baden event.) The Conference, organized by Ann-Louise Silver, celebrated the friendship and professional relationship between Ferenczi and Georg Groddeck (Fortune, 2002). Ferenczi and Groddeck were contemporaries and long-term collaborators of Freud, their work and life were closely connected to the founder of psychoanalysis, although both predeceased him, Ferenczi in 1933 and Groddeck in 1934. While Ferenczi, often called the “mother of psychoanalysis,” hopefully no longer needs a special introduction (and some of the papers in this issue will continue to deepen our knowledge of him), Groddeck's name is not as easy to connect with important events in the history of psychoanalysis. Georg Groddeck is known as the “father of psychosomatic medicine,” called himself the “wild analyst” at the 1920 International Psychoanalytic Conference at The Hague, probably because he was never formally analyzed.

Groddeck was the originator of the concept of the It in 1912, a concept that was taken up as the Id by Freud in The Ego and the Id in 1923. Although Freud credited Groddeck with introducing the term, Groddeck contended that Freud's Id disregarded the constructive aspects of his It, and the Freudian Id did not quite allow for the examination of physical illness (Groddeck's letter to his wife on May 15, 1923, as quoted by Lore Schacht, 1977, p. 13). At his Baden-Baden Sanatorium Groddeck conducted extensive pioneering work with physically ill patients, and explored the symbolic meanings of organic symptoms and their roots in unconscious conflicts.

For many years, the Groddeck Sanatorium in Baden-Baden was the setting for regular scientific meetings and