The Book of the it. By Georg Groddeck.

“The Book of the It,” a unique collection of thirty-three “Psychoanalytic Letters to a Friend” presents a style and content all its own. The author at once disarms all critics by asserting that he has no intention to be scientific, or to follow any particular creed, but wishes to

discourse and speculate freely upon whatever presents itself for consideration. The term “It” or “Es” is apparently used to include whatever is impersonal in our nature or that which is subject to natural laws; and it is here regarded as though it were the “life force” or “life energy” itself—“Every Es unit has within itself two Es units, a male and a female”—“The Es animates the man; it is the power which makes him act, think, grow, become sick or sound, the power in brief which animates him.”

The Es Unit originates at fertilization, but it is even then really a multiplicity which has descended from an ancestral chain from the animal world in which the two sex elements lie in confusion but never mingled. In the fertilized ovule it is the Es which is able to initate and direct all of the subsequent cell divisions and differentiations, giving them distinctive forms and functions. The Es not only takes charge of this cellular division, but thus divides itself as well so that there must be innumerable Es beings in every man. If the male and female Es component drifts down through the ancestral chain, then each cell has these two Es factors and also an individual Es. Moreover, each tissue would have its personal Es as well as those of its countless cells, all of which would become multiplied in terms of organs and groups of organs until an appallingly complex swarm of Es factors would be encountered in an integrated man. On the basis of this, a man's instinctive life as a whole would be represented by the function of groups of cell, tissue, organ, system, and general Es-units, as well as right and left, surface, leg, arm, etc. Es-units—truly a very confusing scheme of affairs, but the author i