From the Elephant's Back (25 page)

And what of the domain of pure accident or misadventure? A man hurt by a falling wall? The victim of a railway accident? Are we to assume that his It has made him a victim of circumstances? We know next to nothing about predisposition—yet it is a term much used by medical men to cover cases where the link of causality appears obvious, the effect related satisfactorily to the cause; thus the victim of hereditary syphilis satisfies the syntax of our logic, while the victim of a railway accident seems simply the passive object of fate. And yet we do unconsciously recognise predisposition in individuals, in our friends, for how often when the news of the accident reaches us do we exclaim “But it
would
happen to someone like X!”? The truth is that all relations between events and objects in this world partake of the mystery of the unknown, and we are no more justified in covering one set of events with words “disease” or “illness” than we are of dismissing another with words like “accident” or “coincidence.” Groddeck himself was too wily a metaphysician to put himself at the mercy of words. “I should tell you something,” he writes,

of the onset of diseases, but the truth is that on this subject I know nothing. And about their cure…of that, too, I know just nothing at all. I take both of them as given facts. At the utmost I can say something about the treatment, and that I will do now. The aim of the treatment, of all medical treatment, is to gain some influence over the It.…Generally speaking, people have been content with the method called “symptomatic treatment” because it deals with the phenomena of disease, the symptoms. And nobody will assert that they were wrong. But we physicians, because we are forced by our calling to play at being God Almighty, and consequently to entertain overwhelming ideas, long to invent a treatment which will do away not with the symptoms but with the cause of the disease. We want to develop causal therapy as we call it. In this attempt we look around for a cause, and first theoretically establish…that there are apparently two essentially different causes, an inner one, causa interna, which the man contributes of himself, and an outer one, causa externa, which springs from his environment. And accepting this clear distinction we have thrown ourselves with raging force upon the external causes, such as bacilli, chills, over-heating, over-drinking, work, and anything else.…Nevertheless in every age there have always been physicians who raised their voices to declare that man himself produced his diseases, that in him are to be found the
causae internae
.…There I have my jumping-off point. One cannot treat in any way but causally. For both ideas are the same; no difference exists between them.…In truth I am convinced that in analysing I do no differently than I did before when I ordered hot baths, gave massage, issued masterful commands, all of which I still do.
The new thing is merely the point of attack in the treatment, the one symptom which appears to me to be there in all circumstances, the “I”.…
My treatment…consists of the attempt to make conscious the unconscious complexes of the “I”.…That is certainly something new but it originated not with me, but with Freud; all that I have done in this matter is to apply the method to organic diseases, because I hold the view that the object of all medical treatment is the It: and I believe the It can be influenced as deeply by psychoanalysis as It can by a surgical operation.

If we have spent much time and space in letting Groddeck, as far as possible in his own words, define and demarcate the territory of the It, the reason should by now be apparent. Not only is the ego-It polarity the foundation-stone upon which his philosophy is built, but without an understanding of it we cannot proceed to frame the portrait of this poet-philosopher-doctor with any adequacy; since his views concerning the function and place of the ego in the world are carried right through, not only in his study of health and disease, but also into the realms of art-criticism and cosmology, where his contributions are no less original and beautiful. Groddeck, like Rank,
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began as a poet and writer, only to turn aside in middle life and embrace the role of healer; lack of first-hand acquaintance with Groddeck's poetry, his one novel, and what his translator describes as “an epic,” prevents me from saying anything about this side of his activities;
[12]
but in his one incomplete volume of art-criticism, published here under the title of
The World of Man
, the reader will be able to follow Groddeck's study of painting in terms of the It-process—for he believed that man creates the world in his own image, that all his inventions and activities, his science, art, behaviour, language, and so on, reflect very clearly the nature of his primitive experience, no less than the confusion between the ego and the It which rules his thoughts and actions. Unfortunately, his death in 1934 prevented him from carrying out more than the groundwork of his plan, which was to review every department of science and knowledge in terms of this hypothesis; but in the fragments he has left us on art, language, and poetry, the metaphysical basis of his philosophy is carefully illustrated and discussed. The humour, the disarming simplicity and poetry of his writing cannot be commented upon by one who has not read his books in the original German, but it is sufficient to say that enough of Groddeck's personality comes through in translation to make the adventure of reading him well worthwhile, both for the doctor and for the contemporary artist—for the knowledge and practice of the one supplements the ardours and defeats of the other; and art and science are linked more closely than ever today by the very terms of the basic metaphysical dilemma which they both face. All paths end in the metaphysics.

Groddeck was often approached for permission to set up a society in England bearing his name, on the lines of the Freudian and Adlerian Societies; but he always laughed away the suggestion with the words “Pupils always want their teacher to stay put.” He was determined that his work should not settle and rigidify into a barren canon of law; that his writings should not become molehills for industrious systematisers, who might pay only lip-service to his theories, respecting the letter of his work at the expense of the spirit. In a way this has been a pity, for it has led to an undeserved neglect—not to mention the downright ignominy of being produced here in a dust-jacket bearing the fatal words, “Issued in sealed glacine wrapper to medical and psychological students only.” And this for
The Book of the It
, which should be on every bookshelf!

There has been no space in this study to quote the many clinical case-histories with which Groddeck illustrates his thesis as he goes along; I have been forced to extract, as it were, the hard capsules of theory, and offer them up without their riders and illustrations. But it is sufficient to say that no analyst can afford to disregard Groddeck's views about such matters as resistance and transference any more than they can afford to disregard him on questions like the duration of analysis, the relation of analysis to organic disorders, and the uses of massage. If he wholeheartedly accepted many of Freud's views there were many reservations, many amendments which he did not hesitate to express. For if Freud's is a philosophy of knowledge, Groddeck's is one of acceptance through understanding.

Another fundamental difference deserves to be underlined—a difference which illustrates the temperamental divergence between Freud and Groddeck as clearly as it does the divergence between the two attitudes to medicine which have persisted, often in opposition, from the time of Hippocrates until today. While Groddeck is campaigning wholeheartedly for the philosophy of non-attachment, he refuses to relinquish his heritage as a European in favour of what he considers an Asiatic philosophy. In his view the European is too heavily influenced by the Christian myth to be capable of really comprehending any other; so it is that his interpretation of the religious attitude to life refers us back to Christ, and if he accepts the Oedipus proposition of Freud, he does not hesitate to say that it seems to him a partial explanation. But Groddeck's Christ differs, radically from the attenuated portraits which have been so much in favour with the dreary puritan theologians of our age and time.

Christ was not, neither will he be; He is. He is not real. He is true. It is not within my power to put all this into words; indeed I believe it is impossible for anyone to express truth of this sort in words, for it is imagery, symbol, and the symbol cannot be spoken. It lives and we are lived by it. One can only use words that are indeterminate and vague—that it why the term It, completely neutral, was so quickly caught up—for any definite description destroys the symbol.

And man, by the terms of Groddeck's psychology, lives by the perpetual symbolisation of his It, through art, music, disease, language. The process of his growth—his gradual freeing of himself from disease, which is malorientation towards his true nature, can only come about by a prolonged and patient self-study; but the study not of the ego in him so much as of the Prime Mover, the It which manifests itself through a multiplicity of idiosyncrasies, preferences, attitudes, and occupations. It is this thorough-going philosophic surrender of Groddeck's to the It which makes his philosophy relevant both to patient, to artist, and to the ordinary man. Thus the symbol of the mother on which he lays such stress in his marvellous essay on childhood fuses into the symbol of the crucifixion, which expresses in artistic terms this profound and tragic preoccupation.

The cross, too, is a symbol of unimaginable antiquity…and if you ask anyone to tell you what the Christian cross may seem to him to resemble, he will most invariably answer
“A figure with outstretched arms.”
Ask why the arms are outstretched and he will say they are ready to embrace. But the cross has no power to embrace, since it is made of wood, nor yet the man who hangs upon it, for he is kept rigid by the nails; moreover he has his back turned to the cross.…What may that cross be to which man is nailed, upon which he must die in order to redeem the world? The Romans use the terms
os sacrum
[13]
for the bone which is over the spot where the birth-pangs start, and in German it is named the cross-bone,
Kreuzbein.
The mother-cross longs to embrace, but cannot, for the arms are inflexible, yet the longing is there and never ceases.…Christ hangs upon the cross, the Son of Man, the man as Son. The yearning arms which yet may not embrace are to me the mother's arms. Mother and son are nailed together, but can never draw near to each other. For the mother there is no way of escape from her longing than to become dead wood…but the Son, whose words
“Woman, what have I to do with thee?”
gave utterance to the deepest mystery of our human world, dies of his own Will and in full consciousness upon that cross…

It is in his writings on the nature of art and myths that we can see, most clearly revealed, the kernel of his thought concerning the nature of symbolism and the relation of man to the ideological web he has built about himself; it is here too that one will see how clearly and brilliantly Groddeck interpreted the role of art in society. He is the only psychoanalyst for whom the artist is not an interesting cripple but someone who has, by the surrender of his ego to the flux of the It, become the agent and translator of the extra-causal forces which rule us. That he fully appreciated the terrible, ambivalent forces to which the artist is so often a prey is clear; but he also sees that the artist's dilemma is also that of everyman, and that this dilemma is being perpetually restated in art, just as it is being restated in terms of disease or language. We live (perhaps I should paraphrase the verb as Groddeck does), we are lived by a symbolic process, for which our lives provide merely a polished surface on which it may reflect itself. Just as linguistic relations appear as “effective beliefs” in the dreams of Groddeck's patients, so the linguistic relations of symbolism, expressed in art, place before the world a perpetual picture of the penalties, the terror, and magnificence of living—or of being lived by this extra-causal reality whose identity we cannot guess. “However learned and critical we may be,” writes Groddeck, “something within us persists in seeing a window as an eye, a cave as a mother, a staff as the father.” Traced back along the web of affective relations these symbols yield, in art, a calculus of primitive preoccupation, and become part of the language of the It; and the nature of man, seen by the light of them, becomes something more than a barren ego with its dualistic conflicts between black and white. Indeed the story of the Gospels, as reinterpreted in the light of Groddeck's non-attachment, yields a far more fruitful crop of meanings than is possible if we are to judge it by the dualistic terms of the ego, which is to say, of the will. “Only in the form of Irony can the deepest things of life be uttered, for they lie always outside morality; moreover truth itself is always ambivalent, both sides are true. Whoever wants to understand the Gospel teachings would do well to bear these things in mind.” And Groddeck's Christ, interpreted as an Ironist, is perhaps the Christ we are striving to reinterpret to ourselves today. There is no room here for the long-visaged, long-suffering historical Christ of the contemporary interpretation, but a Christ capable of symbolising and fulfilling his artistic role, his artistic sacrifice, against the backcloth of a history which, while it can never be fully understood, yet carries for us a deliberate and inexorable meaning disguised in its symbolism.

If we have insisted, in the course of this essay, on the presentation of Groddeck as a philosopher it is because what he has to say has something more than a medical application. In medicine he might be considered simply another heretical Vitalist, for whom the whole is something more than the sum of its parts: certainly he has often been dismissed as a doctor “who applied psycho-analysis to organic disease with remarkable results.” While one cannot deny his contributions to psychoanalysis, it would not be fair to limit his researches to this particular domain, although the whole of his working life was spent in the clinic, and although he himself threw off his writings without much concern for their fate. Yet it would also be unjust to represent him as a philosopher with a foot-rule by which he measured every human activity. The common factor in all his work is the attitude and the It-precept which was sufficiently large as to include all manifestations of human life; it does not delimit, or demarcate, or rigidify the objects upon which it gazes. In other words he refused the temptations of an artificial morality in his dealings with life, and preferred to accord it full rights as an Unknown
[14]
from which it might be possible for the individual to extract an equation for ordinary living; in so doing he has a message not only for doctors but for artists as well, for the sick no less than for the sound. And one can interpret him best by accepting his It-concept (under the terms of the true-false ambivalence on which he insisted so much) both as truth and as poetic figment. And since Groddeck preferred to consider himself a European and a Christian it would be equally unjust to harp on the eastern religious systems from which the It may seem to derive, or to which it may seem related. (“The power of the eye to see depends entirely on the power of vision inherent in that Light which sees through the eye but which the eye does not see; which hears through the ear, but which the ear does not hear; which thinks through the mind but which the mind does not think. It is the unseen Seer, the unheard Hearer, the unthought Thinker. Other than It there is no seer, hearer, thinker.”
Shri Krishna Prem
.
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)