The Book of the It

The Book Of The It (1923) is a key text in the history of psychoanalytical thought and the investigation of human sexual compulsion. Georg Groddeck posits the "It" as the unconscious force that drives human behavior and underpins its poles of attraction and revulsion, standing as the root source of physical disease. It was this notion that Freud would modify into his concept of the Id, a primal calculus of sex and violence.

Georg Groddeck was an advocate of self-healing, believing that recognizing the "It" was the first step necessary to understanding human illness. He defines a zone of blood, bodily excretion, mutilation, nightmare and psychosexual dysfunction to reveal the most hidden recesses of the human psyche.

Georg Walther Groddeck was born in Germany in 1866. Originally a writer, 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 until his death in 1934.