Freud’s Queer Fellow: Georg Groddeck Between Psychoanalytic Theory and Literary Modernism

Abstract

The article aims to interpret the psychoanalytical thought of Georg Groddeck (1866–1934) presented in his post-1918 literary works and essays. In 1917, Groddeck contacted Sigmund Freud and thereby entered German-language psychoanalytic circles. In 1921, he published a psychoanalytic novel titled Der Seelensucher. Ein psychoanalytischer Roman. Two years later, he followed it by The Book of the It. Psychoanalytic Letters to a Friend (Das Buch vom Es. Psychoanalytische Briefe an eine Freundin), which disputed Freud’s concept of the unconscious. This paper postulates that Groddeck cleared new paths for the psychoanalytic thought of that time and thus anticipated later theoretical propositions in gender studies and queer theory. It also sheds light on the modernist dimension of the German physician’s work, which can be found both in his experimental approach towards the languages of literature and medicine, and in his transformation of Freud’s theoretical concepts.