ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), a pioneer for meaning-full disease in a very unsympathetic era. Groddeck wrote extensively about the meaning of illness. Later, Groddeck and Sigmund Freud engaged in a lively correspondence extending over many years. Freud seems to have been very impressed with Groddeck, though saw him as being on the margins of psychoanalytic orthodoxy. Groddeck's propositions are what most moderns would call 'essentialist' in the sense they propose something more 'essential,' the It, beneath or behind the surface of human functioning, human perception, and human construction. Groddeck also clearly saw disease as a communication. Groddeck posited the It as a governing core reality within the person, a force which expressed in the language of the body certain needs, directions, and issues for resolution.
