OPINION
So there I was curled up in front of the heater on a cold King’s Birthday Weekend, reading the latest copy of English literary journal Horizon - as in, the latest copy I got at a second-hand bookstore. It was published in June 1948. It had a poem by Louis MacNeice and a memoir by Augustus John and a short story by Tom Hopkinson. There was also an appreciation by Lawrence Durrell of psychoanalyst Georg Groddeck (1866-1934). Fair to say that it basically blew my mind.
So Groddeck was a strange fish, with strange ideas. His strangest and most powerful idea was his theory of It. He does not mean the theory of the killer clown Pennywise in the film of the Stephen King book It. He means an It that drives all of us - as in, an It that drives us from A to B, drives us astray and/or crazy, gives us drive to get up and go about our business. In many ways this It actually is like the killer clown Pennywise in the film of the Stephen King book It. Pennywise exists in a gutter, or that underworld of our subconscious; and so, too, does Groddeck’s It.
So what it comes down to is this devasting sentence that Groddeck wrote in his 1923 book The Book of the It: “We do not live but we are being lived.” He meant that we do as we are told by a mysterious inner force that he called the It. He wrote, “There is no such thing as an I. It’s a lie, a misrepresentation to say: I think, I live. It should be: It thinks, It lives. There is no I.”