Steve Braunias: Discovering the neglected secret of life

Another "It" reading on the couch, hoping to inspire reflections on life. Photo / Getty Images

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.”

So what to make of that proposition? Even though I was reading it in a journal from 1948, it struck me as radical, challenging, new. The notion directly contradicts everything we are tell ourselves in the modern age – that we exercise free will, that we make choices, that we are responsible for our own lives. We are in charge. We curate our own lives. Groddeck heads this off at the pass. He wrote, “Everyone who considers the matter for a moment knows that there is no such thing as free will among human beings, but also that it is beyond our power not to believe in it.”

So the idea, the theory, made him famous, and he entered into a long, warm correspondence with Freud. They began writing to each other in 1917, and first met in person in 1920, at the international psychoanalytic congress in The Hague. Groddeck reputedly drew a mixed reception with his presentation at the congress. His opening statement was confrontational: “I am a wild psychoanalyst.” Maybe they thought of him as Pennywise, that weird and destructive It.

So the friendship between Groddeck and Freud hit the rocks over the It. Freud adapted the theory and came up with another meaning, another term: the Id. Groddeck wrote to Freud that he was the “godfather” of his Id idea; Freud eventually admitted to Groddeck that he had “borrowed” his It idea. Id, It - both or either exist as our dark Other, our lurking and inexplicable Pennywise. Groddeck wrote, “Everything human is dependent on this infinitely mysterious entity, and I also persist in maintaining that nobody can fathom the depths of the It.”

So the source of “this infinitely mysterious entity”, according to Groddeck, is the great enduring subject of psychoanalysis: sex. Sex, he reasoned, is the life force that animates mankind from womb to grave. Sex is the hidden impulse that influences every aspect of individual personality. Sex – in grotesque caricature, leering and insatiable - is Pennywise!

So poor old Groddeck came to a bad end. He fled Nazi Germany for Switzerland, then demanded an audience with Hitler – he was convinced a word in his ear would persuade him to change his policies. He talked about having a cure for cancer. He was visited by an ex-student; she thought Groddeck had become psychotic. He died in 1934. By the time Lawrence Durrell wrote his 1948 essay, headlined “Studies in Genius”, Groddeck had already passed into obscurity. Durrell laments that his books are out of print. The Book of the It, he writes, is “a neglected masterpiece”.

So he was on to something, wasn’t he? I love the idea, its beauty and mystery – the existence of an It is at once liberating and an imprisonment. We can’t help ourselves; we’re automatons, directed to act and behave by forces beyond our control. This column is brought to you by It. There is no you: you are It, too.