Letter from Georg Groddeck to Sigmund Freud, May 9, 1922

Baden Baden, May 9, 1922

Dear Professor,

During the past few days I have experienced a little episode which I want you to know about. I have a young patient who is trying to work out an analysis of Aristotle in a way that corresponds with his own complexes. Every day this attempt brings nice surprises although coping with the dead language is quite difficult. When Aristotle mentions things that touch on his impotence and castration complex he starts talking and always uses the same expression τoθϵτι. The translators maintain that this is the same as Kant's Ding an sich and translate it accordingly. We agree that Kant invented the Ding an sich (which according to him is unknowable) on the basis of a castration complex which contains masturbation anxiety and hermaphrodite complexes. The Ding an sich would thus be the Ding an Kant, just as Luther's ‘Man's heart is an obstinate and cowardly thing’ and ‘It is a good thing that the heart becomes firm’ stand for the slackness and erection of the penis and establish most intimate connections with the heart. In the course of such a discussion my patient told me the following: he had just read something on degrees of accuracy in a book by Moskovsky, and Moskovsky was using the sea in his argument. (The patient has an unresolved Oedipal complex and curiously enough did not understand that he was talking of himself by way of association - Meer = la mère - while he was interpreting Moskovsky with my help.) According to Moskovsky there are four degrees of accuracy in the observation of the sea: first the shape of a