Groddeck is described as a cultured, charming, gifted gentleman whose life was embellished by the friendships of the most eminent psychoanalysts of the day including Horney, Fromm-Reichman, Ferenczi, Jones, and Freud. A quotation from Freud's The Ego and The Id acknowledging Groddeck's contributions to psychoanalysis adorns the frontispiece of the biography. But disinterested criticism reveals that he was a man who attempted to replace revolutionary scientific thinking with specious rebellious suppositions and whose work was hampered by his credo, 'I would want my own way, right or wrong'.

Groddeck introduced a concept of Es which bears a relation to the id in name only. In discussing the unity of body and mind, he stated: 'The Body and Mind is one and it harbors an Es'. He considered the Es to have independent 'symptomatic activity' and simultaneously believed 'the Es heals'. 'The Es affects the senses, digestion, and heart action', he wrote. Concurrently the power of the Es disappears and it must 'protect itself against the threat of all