ABSTRACT
Psycho-analytic case histories tell of intestinal disturbances, catarrhs of the throat, and anomalies of menstruation, which have developed as reactions to repressed wishes, or which represent such wishes disguised and unrecognizable to the conscious mind. It will certainly not have escaped the attentive reader of psycho-analytic literature that we consider the unconscious as the layer of the mind nearest to the physical; a layer that commands instinctual forces which arc not at all, or only to a much lesser extent, accessible to the conscious. Dr. Georg Groddeck has even succeeded through psychoanalytical work, that is through making such tendencies conscious, in improving, even curing, very severe organic illnesses such as goitre, sclerodermia, and cases of gout and tuberculosis. Groddeck is far from assuming the role of a magician, and he states modestly that his aim was merely to create, through psycho-analysis, more favourable conditions ‘for the it by which one is lived’.
