Totality in Groddeck's and Jung's Conception: Es and Selbst¹

ABSTRACT

The German pronoun Es has been used by Georg Groddeck since 1909 to represent the totality of the human being, a concept that allowed him to consider both mind and body together from a conceptual and therapeutic perspective. In 1923 - a month after the issue of Groddeck's most famous book - The Ego and the Id was published, where Freud resumed Groddeck's term with a much more restrictive meaning that has obscured the original one. Groddeck was very disappointed but continued to develop his own concept of das Es, which is significantly akin to the Jungian Selbst (self) mainly because of their common cultural background, with a prominent reference to Carus’ and Nietzsche's conception of the unconscious. In 1977, similar ideas have reemerged in psychoanalysis with Kohut's ‘self psychology,’ which nevertheless presents a more personalistic orientation.

KEYWORDS:

• Groddeck
• id
• it
• Kohut
• psychosomatics
• self

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Notes on contributor

Marco Balenci is a Jungian analyst, a member of the Associazione Italiana di Psicologia Analitica (AIPA), the American Psychological Association (APA) and the International Association for Analytical Psychology (IAAP). His research interests are mainly directed to the history of analytic concepts and to Jungian psychosomatics; he is also the author of the chapter ‘Il Sé’ (The self) for the Trattato di Psicologia Analitica edited by Aldo Carotenuto, and he translated into Italian Anna Freud's biography by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. He is in private practice in Florence.

Notes

1. Revised and expanded version of a paper first published as Balenci, M. (1993) ‘La storia dell’Es di Groddeck e il Sé junghiano’ [The story of the Es by Groddeck and the Jungian self], in (ed.) G. Antonelli, Forme del sapere in psicologia. Milan: Bompiani, pp. 169–183. Since the German word Es, in English translations, is rendered with ‘Id’ in the works of Freud and with ‘It’ in the writings of Groddeck, I preferred not to translate Es and not even Selbst (self) to make them visible in the text. I have also substituted these terms in the English translations (excluding the titles) just to point out the original reference, which is useful to the arguments discussed. About the problems of English translations of psychoanalytic terms and of Freud's works, see Rycroft (1972, pp. 66 and 79); Bettelheim (1982) and Solms (1998).

2. See Freud and Groddeck (1988, p. 87) and Schur (1972, p. 356 and the footnote about Groddeck's assumption on Freud's cancer in 1923).

3. Linguistically it should be noted that, in German, Es expresses impersonality, while Selbst – used as a noun – means individuality: from this point of view they emphasize on different aspects of a psychic entity other than consciousness.

4. Lewinter (1990, p. 15) finds in Spinoza's Ethics the foundations of what he calls Groddeck's ‘metaphisical “system”’.

5. See Jarrett (1981) and Nitzschke (1983). See also Shamdasani (2003, pp. 197–202).

6. A term introduced by Nietzsche (1883) in Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

7. Jung resumed from Bleuler (1925) the concept of die Psychoide, which defines the subcortical biological processes with adaptation function.

8. See in particular: Neumann (1953), Meier (1963), Dieckmann (1974), Fordham (1979), Stevens (1982), Bruillon (1983).

9. Since July 1920, Groddeck was associated with the Psychoanalytic Society of Berlin.

10. Franz Alexander, Michael Balint, Felix Deutsch, Flanders Dumbar, George Engel, Erich Fromm, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, Karen Horney, Smith Ely Jelliffe, Ernst Simmel and Harold Searles: see Fortune (2002), Rudnytsky (2002), Poster (2009), Hristeva and Poster (2013) and Poster, Hristeva, and Giefer (2016).

11. For Ferenczi, see the letter to Jones 29 May 1933 (Freud & Jones, 1993, p. 721) where Freud speaks of ‘paranoia,’ Jones (1961, pp. 493–494) and Alexander and Selesnick (1966, pp. 222–225); for Groddeck, see Grossman and Grossman (1965, chapter 16: Genius or Idiot, Angel or Devil, pp. 146–156) and Martynkewicz (1997, pp. 303–305).

12. In Jung's works we find the expression ‘personalistic psychology’ (also in reference to Adler and Freud) to understand a conception of psyche that is limited to the individual experience and does not take into account its collective contents. For a terminological clarification, see Baudouin (1975, p. 298).

13. See Otto (1923).

14. Both Jung and Freud explained their own Weltanschauung: see Jung (1928/1931) and Freud (1932–1933, lesson 35, pp. 157–182).