Georg Groddeck: Originality and Exclusion

Abstract

This paper reviews Georg Groddeck's contribution to medicine and the other human sciences. His creative and original thinking, which was both radical and provocative, deserves a fresh appraisal. I present some of the ideas he developed in his seminal `Psychic Conditioning and the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Organic Disorders', published in German in 1917, which may be considered as the foundation of modern psychosomatic medicine. In this text, Groddeck proposed that all diseases contain symbolic meanings which need to be unveiled in order to bring about mental and physical transformation. He held that unconscious processes determine how susceptible we are to diseases, the nature of these diseases, and the conditions for our recovery. Groddeck's work has been neglected, and I suggest that his radical ideas about the connection between the mind and the body make his work simultaneously difficult to assimilate and essential for expanding this frontier of knowledge.