The book of the it : psychoanalytic letters to a friend / [Georg Walther Groddeck].

  • Georg Groddeck
Date:
[1935]
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The book of the it : psychoanalytic letters to a friend / [Georg Walther Groddeck]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    cancer goes backward in strength and courage, and the doctor cuts if he sees the illness “at an early stage.” But if you go further into the question you will find that the backward movement stands in an enforced relation¬ ship to childish observations, which, after undergoing early repression, have been operating ever since. The little angel of a girl-child is certainly not innocent, as people like to suppose, certainly not pure, as superior people maintain, any more than is the dove which is displayed to us as the symbol of innocence and purity, though the Greeks made it the companion of the goddess of love; this little angel sees the curious movements of hound and bitch, of cock and hen, and since she is not stupid and guesses from the foolish behaviour of mother and teacher that she is standing before the secret of sex-love, she makes a mental comparison between this and that other, to her far more important, secret of the parental bedroom. In other words, the child comes to the idea that inter¬ course takes place from behind, and buries this idea in the depths of her mind until one day it rises again in the form of anxiety by the path of association via “back¬ wards” and “crab.” But the shears—I need hardly say— lead directly and indirectly to the great anxiety prob¬ lem of castration, of the transformation of the woman supposed to be originally a man, into a female woman, through the cutting off of the penis, which leaves between the legs a hole which bleeds from time to time. This idea itself is supported by experience, one of the first experi¬ ences oflife, the cutting of the umbilical cord. Of all the theories put forward in connection with cancer, only one has in my opinion survived the passage of time, namely, that cancer leads through definite stages to death. I mean by that that what is not fatal is not cancer. From that you may conclude that I hold out no hope of a new method of curing cancer. But in all the many cases of so-called cancer it is worth just once questioning the It of the patient. Ever yours, Patrik Troll.
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