The book of the it : psychoanalytic letters to a friend / by Georg Groddeck. Authorized translation furnished and revised by the author.

  • Groddeck, Georg, 1866-1934.
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: In copyright

Credit: The book of the it : psychoanalytic letters to a friend / by Georg Groddeck. Authorized translation furnished and revised by the author. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    used of the Gymnasium in which I followed my classical studies, and where I suffered much that I should have to tell you of, if I were concerned to make you understand the unfolding of my nature. That, however, is not what is in my mind, but only the fact that I attributed all the hatred and the suffering of my schooldays to science, because it is more convenient to ascribe one’s depression to external events than to seek its roots in the depths of the unconscious. Later, only very late, did it become clear to me that the ex¬ pression “Alma Mater,” nursing mother, recalled the earliest and the hardest conflict of my life. My mother had nursed only her eldest child; at that time she was visited with a severe inflamma¬ tion of the breasts which atrophied the milkglands. My birth must have taken place a day or two earlier than was expected. In any case, the wet-nurse who had been engaged for me was not yet in the house, and for three days I was scantily nourished by a woman who came twice a day in order to feed me. That did me no harm, one might say, but who can judge the feelings of a suckling babe? To have to go hungry is not a kind welcome for a new-born infant. Now and then I have become acquainted with people who have had a like experience, and even if I can¬ not prove that they suffered mental harm thereby, still it seems to me quite probable that they did. And by comparsion with them I think I have come off well. There is, for instance, the case of a woman—I have known her for many a year—whom her mother conceived a dislike for at her birth, and whom she did not nurse, as she had the other children, but left her to a nursemaid and the bottle. The baby, however, preferred going hungry to being suckled through a rub¬ ber tube, and so grew more and more sickly, until the doctor roused the mother out of her antipathy. From being callous she now became most attentive to her child: a wet nurse was engaged and never an hour passed without the mother’s going to look after the baby. The youngster began to flourish and grew up a healthy woman. The mother made a pet of her and up to the time of her death, tried to win her daughter’s love, but in that daughter only hatred survived. Her whole life has been a steady chain of enmity whose separate links are forged by re¬ venge. She plagued her mother so long as she lived, deserted her on her deathbed, persecuted, without realizing what she was doing, everyone who reminded her of her mother, and to