The Book of the It

Book excerpt: Georg Walther Groddeck was born in Germany in 1866. Although he spent his early years as a writer—he produced a novel, poetry, and a volume of art criticism—he became a doctor in middle life and, from that point on, thought of himself as healer rather than artist. He spent the remainder of his life as director of a clinic at Baden-Baden, and continued to write, but his plan for reviewing every aspect of knowledge in terms of the hypothesis presented in The Book of the It was cut short by his death in 1934. His other books, The World of Man, The Unknown Self, and Exploring the Unconscious, are collections of Groddeck’s writings on science, cosmology, and art.