ABSTRACT
Georg Groddeck was a German physician practising around the turn of the century, who shared his physician-father's scepticism about socalled "medical science". According to Groddeck's translator, V. M. E. Collins, he became known in both Germany and England "as a masterful physician who had astonishing success with patients suffering from chronic symptoms long since abandoned as non-curable by others". As Lawrence Durrell points out, Groddeck was "using Sigmund Freud for ends far greater than Freud himself could ever perceive". Groddeck's approach to healing greatly illuminates current debates about the relative efficacy of differing approaches or "schools" in therapy. Existing forms of professionalization have predominantly been developed within the assumptive base and ideological discourse of modernity and a predominantly technocratic world-view, and are inevitably contaminated by "the tendency of helpers of all kinds to objectify people, words and experiences".
