Letter from Georg Groddeck to Sigmund Freud, May 27, 1923

Baden Baden, May 27, 1923

Dear Professor,

Many thanks for sending me The Ego and the Id. As the godfather of this term I am now expected to say something about it. Yet the only thing I can think of is a comparison which throws light on our relationship and our attitude to the world, but does not say anything about the book. In this comparison I appear to myself as a plough, and you as the peasant who uses the plough - or perhaps another one - for his purposes. The one thing we have in common is that we dig up the ground. Yet you intend to sow and perhaps, if God and the weather allow it, to harvest a crop. The plough only wants to dig up and, by the way, reduce the stones which might blunt it. And since the plough has no eyes, but is afraid of stones, it occasionally sticks in order to make the farmer watch out and prevent the plough from getting blunt. For the plough this is a vital question, for the farmer ultimately a question of money since he can replace the unusable plough with a new one. Nevertheless it is not pleasant for the farmer if his tool becomes unusable.

My work ‘Vorbewusst und Vorlust’ (Pre-conscious and fore-pleasure) was such a case of ‘sticking’. This is no stone yet, but it marks the plough's anxiety since it does not know what the farmer's intentions are, is at the mercy of the soil and cautious as to the soil's condition. You can survey the whole field, I merely have the dim impression of stony ground. Take, for instance, your derivation of sadism from the destructive drives. There I stick and do not want to go on, for I am afraid that the soil will destroy the seeds and cause weeds to grow. I may be wrong, but I believe that I know the effect you have on the soil, e.g. on your pupils, better than the farmer. For him a crop failure in this or that spot is not so important. The present-day generation of your disciples is of importance only to us, not to you.

Then there is a real stone, or at least something that I