By Georg Groddeck
IN German literature Groddeck must be known to many as a physician full of temperament who had always held scientific obscurity in horror, and who, like the original Schweniger, looked at men and things, illnesses and cures, with his own eyes, described them in his own words, and did not allow himself to be forced on to the Procrustean bed of conventional terminology.
Some of his writings appear to be similar to some psycho-analytical theses. In his first period, however, the author turned against the Freudian school, as he had done against every other. Eventually his fanaticism for truth proved stronger than his hatred of ‘scholarly erudition’, and he publicly admitted that he had been mistaken when he had fought against the creator of psycho-analysis, and, what is still more unusual, he unmasked coram publico his own unconscious, in which he revealed a tendency that drove him, out of pure envy, into opposition to Freud. It is not surprising that Groddeck, even after openly confessing his adhesion to psycho-analysis, did not follow the customary course of one of Freud’s pupils, but went his own way. He had little interest in mental illnesses, the proper field of analytical research; even the words ‘psyche’ and ‘psychic’ sounded false to his monistically-tuned ear. Quite consistently he thought that if he was right in his monism, and if the teachings of psycho-analysis were correct too, then psycho-analysis must prove valid also in the field of organic phenomena. With confident courage he turned the analytic armoury against organic diseases, and he soon reported on case histories which proved the correctness of his surmises. In many cases of severe organic illness he recognized the action of unconscious intentions, which, according to him, played a prominent part in the causation of all human suffering. To his way of thinking, bacteria are always and everywhere present; when and how man avails himself of their services depends on his unconscious will. Even the development of tumours, haemorrhages, inflammations, and so on may be fostered, even provoked, by such ‘intentions’, so that Groddeck finally came to consider these tendencies as a conditio sine qua non of every illness. According to him the central motive of these latent, illness-causing tendencies is always the sexual instinct; the organism easily and willingly becomes ill if thereby it can satisfy its sexuality or escape a sexual unpleasure. And in the same way as psycho-analysis cures illnesses of the mind by making conscious hidden urges and overcoming resistances to repressed tendencies, so Groddeck says he has influenced the course of severe organic illnesses by methodical analytic therapy.
I have no knowledge whether other physicians have examined these remarkable therapeutic results and have proved or disproved them, and so for the time being I cannot say definitely whether we have to do here with a really new therapeutic method of genius or with the suggestive power of a single extraordinary medical man. On no account, however, could the consistency of the author’s arguments or the sincerity of his main idea be doubted.
Now this research worker has prepared for us a new and not unimportant surprise; he presents himself in his latest book as poet and novelist. I do not believe, however, that his main aim in doing so was to acquire literary fame; the novel offered him a suitable medium for getting off his chest the latest consequences of his new ideas about illness and life, men and institutions. As probably he has very little faith in the capacity of his contemporaries to accept something new and unaccustomed, he finds it necessary to mitigate the strangeness of his ideas with the help of a comic and thrilling plot, that is to say to bribe his readers with a premium of pleasure.
I am no literary critic and do not presume to judge the aesthetic value of this novel; I believe, however, that it cannot be a bad book which succeeds, as this does, in holding the reader from beginning to end and in putting difficult biological and physiological problems in a humorous and even comic form, and in presenting with gentle humour crudely grotesque and deeply tragic scenes which, taken by themselves, would have been repugnant.
He wittily represents his hero, Müller-Weltlein, the ‘Seelensucher’,1 as a genial fool, and the reader can never be certain when he is revealing the results of his genius or of his folly. In this way Groddeck-Weltlein is able to ventilate many things which he could not either in a scientific book or in a seriously meant fantasy without challenging the whole world. The indignant bourgeois would immediately call for the strait jacket; but as the mocking author has already donned it himself, even the guardians of public morals have no choice but to put a good face on it and laugh. Moreover, many a physician, thinker, and philosopher will find in this book the beginnings of a philosophy freed from the shackles of traditional mysticism and dogmatism and the rudiments of a re-evaluation of man and institutions. The educational value of the book lies in the fact that the author, like Swift, Rabelais, and Balzac in the past, has torn the mask from the face of the pious, hypocritical spirit of the age and has exposed the cruelty and lust hidden behind it while at the same time comprehending its inevitability.
It is almost impossible to give a brief report of the content of this novel. The hero is a middle-aged bachelor whose ordered solitude, spent in contemplative reading, is disturbed by the sudden emergence of a widowed sister and her marriageable young daughter. What really happened between the hero and the daughter we are never explicitly told; we can hardly even guess from the vague hints given us. In the beds of the house vermin—bed-bugs—make their home, and in their extermination the master of the house eagerly helps. In the chase after these bloodthirsty parasites the hero becomes crazy,2 that is to say, he frees himself of all the shackles imposed by tradition, inheritance, and education. He becomes ‘changed’, even changes his name and becomes a vagrant. At the same time, however, his money and his old connexions secure him the entry into the highest of the high strata of society; wherever he arrives he makes good use of his fool’s liberty to cast the truth into people’s faces, and in this way the reader comes to hear truths which even Groddeck would not dare to utter except with the fool’s cap on his head. We see and hear our Müller-Weltlein in the police cell, in a low-class skittle alley, in the general ward of a hospital, in a picture gallery, at the Zoo, in a fourth-class railway compartment, at a street-corner meeting, at a feminist congress, among hard-boiled prostitutes, tricksters, and blackmailers, and even at a drinking bout with a Prussian royal prince.
Everywhere he speaks and behaves as a real ‘enfant terrible’, notices and comments on everything, admits consciously and openly to the unavoidably childish basic quality of the adult, and ridicules all the boastful and swaggering hypocrites. The chief motive of his folly remains all the time the bed-bugs, obviously a remnant of the traumatic event hinted at in the beginning of the book, and he never wearies of repeating its many-sided symbolism. Moreover, like a child he finds real pleasure in every sort of symbolic equation wherever he can discover one, and in their discovery he becomes a real champion. Symbolism, which psycho-analysis has considered rather tentatively as one of the factors leading to the formation of ideas, is for Weltlein deeply rooted in the organic, perhaps even in the cosmic, and sexuality is the pivot round which the whole world of symbols revolves. All the work of man is only plastic representation of the genitals and of the genital act, of that archaic prototype of all longing and endeavour. The world is dominated by a magnificent unity. The dualism of body and soul is a superstition. The whole body thinks; thoughts can find expression in the form of a moustache, a corn, even of excreta. The soul is ‘infected’ by the body, the body by the contents of the soul; and in fact it is not permissible to talk of an ‘ego’. One does not live, but one ‘is lived’ by a ‘something’. The strongest ‘infections’ are the sexual ones. He who does not want to see eroticism becomes myopic; he who cannot ‘smell’ eroticism catches a cold. The preference for the erotogenic zone may manifest itself in the formation of one’s features, in, for instance, double chin. The priest is clerically ‘infected’ by his cassock; it is not the woman who knits a stocking; on the contrary, knitting knits the whole female sex into a pathetic pettiness. The highest human achievement is giving birth; the spiritual efforts of man are but ridiculous attempts at imitating it. The desire for children is so general—both in man and woman—that ‘no one becomes fat except because of an unsatisfied longing for a child’. Even illnesses and injuries are not merely sources of suffering, out of them wells also the ‘nourishing power of completion’.
Of course Weltlein feels most at home in the nursery where he plays with the children with gusto, and finds sympathetic pleasure in their still naïve eroticism. On the other hand, it is against the scientists and especially the physicians that he battles most vigorously. Their stupid limitation is the favourite target for his mockery. Even psycho-analysis is not spared entirely, although the fine irony with which it is treated is sheer affection compared with the cruelty with which the ‘school psychiatry’ is exposed in the stocks of ridicule. It is with sorrow that we hear of the catastrophic end of this laughing martyr. He is killed in a railway disaster—but even after death he flaunts his cynicism; his head cannot be found, and his identity can be established only from intimate details of his body, the task, remarkably enough, being attempted only by—his niece.
This then is an extremely condensed account of the contents of this psycho-analytic novel. It is certain that Groddeck-Weltlein ‘will be interpreted, commented on, torn to pieces, maligned, and misunderstood to death’, as Balzac said of Rabelais in the Contes Drolâtiques. But in the same way as Gargantua and Pantagruel have been preserved for us, perhaps a future epoch will see that justice is done for our Weltlein.