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The name Groddeck will not be forgotten so long as Freud's book on psychic structure is read by a psycho-analytical public. But the fact that Freud borrowed from Groddeck the term 'Id' (It) tends to obscure the latter's more individual claim to enduring recognition. Groddeck would doubtless be the last to claim distinction as a propagandist, yet the fact remains that he is one of the most forceful and original of propagandists in the history of psychological medicine. He has done more than anyone else in recent times to demonstrate to a hidebound medical faculty the universal exploitation of mechanisms of conversion hysteria, the conversion element in organic disease and the psychic gains of illness in general. To this enthusiastic interest he has coupled a passion for investigating the precipitating psychic factors in neurotic and other illness. Over and above all this, his imagination has been fired by the idea of impersonal forces manifesting themselves through various somatic and psychic activities and structures.
This conception is by no means unfamiliar, and its application in psychic affairs certainly helps us to cultivate a sense of perspective concerning the relation of the conscious Ego to the rest of the psyche. Groddeck has always presented these relations in a masterly way, and the present volume, although by no means of the same quality as some of his earlier works, contains many of those illuminating passages with which we have become familiar.
Having paid tribute to these gifts of terse expression and to the tenacity with which he holds by no means popular views, it must be said that his enthusiasm at times outruns his sense of proportion. And on some occasions he quite obviously does scant justice to the nature and function of Ego systems. It is easy to say that his 'It' concept includes everything else, hence is not comparable with the Freudian 'Id.' And of course he admits that the closest access we have to this 'It' is by means of psycho-a