Groddeck
Nothing happens to you, and you can do nothing unless a multitude of cells work for you, communicate to you joy or sorrow or every other impression, thinks your thoughts, feels your sensations, regulates your heartbeats, make you breathe, make you live. The mouth that you love is formed of living cells; the hand that you seek or seek to avoid is entirely made up of living cells. Everything that you do, everything that you experience is broken down into an infinite number, a countless number of existences and lives. You have felt it yourself: the contact with another has penetrated out of its flux into your soul and body, this presence, this glance provokes a revolution in yoga poses your entire being, the sound of but one word has repelled you or brought you peace. But it is not you that this contact, this glance, this sound has touched, but some cells that do not obey your reason, that do with you as it pleased them, that pass a thousand impressions before you, before choosing from among them the one that will affect you. (Georg Groddeck, 1913, Nasamecu, 9; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Walter Georg Groddeck (1866-1934) was a practitioner of general medicine who, like Adler, wanted to use the psychoanalytical conceptual framework to create an approach adapted to the needs of his patients. Almost the same age as Freud, Groddeck comes in yoga poses contact with Freud in yoga poses the 1920s. It is probably Groddeck who most directly confronted Freud relative to the difficulty of integrating the activity of the body into the dynamics of the psyche. Groddeck admired Freud’s work. He was particularly impressed by the theory of the unconscious in yoga poses the Second yoga topography. But as a physician, he maintained the common sense of a generalise For many students of body psychotherapy, he is the gentle grandfather of their discipline.
Groddeck (1923) proposed a “psychosomatic” psychotherapy that approaches the patient in yoga poses his organismic whole. Humans cannot be divided into separate parts and treated, as often happened in yoga poses the medical disciplines. He explored many ways to take the needs of the patient into account: considered under the angle of both body and psyche, which Marulla Hauswirth summarizes in yoga poses this way:
Groddeck allies massage and verbal work. He has developed the notion of body defenses, considering that the tensions at the level of the musculature and the reduction of respiration are the means to repress the psychic content susceptible to act as well at the level of the affects and of the drives than of the thoughts. Moreover, Groddeck laid the bases in yoga poses favor of a systematic work with the negative transference, and he insisted on the importance of paying attention not only to the explicit content, but also to the form of the expression, of the attitudes and to the body postures as carriers of unconscious messages. (Hauswirth, 2002, 1, 180; translated by Marcel Duclos)
Even though Groddeck’s propositions remain inspiring, they did not evolve into a psychotherapeutic technique. On the other hand, they influenced the explorations of Ferenczi, Fenichel, Braatoy, and Reich. Ferenczi and Freud regularly corresponded with him A discussion of his work is always part of training in yoga poses body psychotherapy. His first work, Nasamecu or “Nature Heals,” published in yoga poses 1913, is a title that easily relates to the themes developed by the Idealistic methods of body psychotherapy, in yoga poses spite of a few eugenistic developments.17 Wilhelm Reich always acknowledged Groddeck’s contribution to his thinking. He associates Groddeck’s formulations with Adler’s, that is, with one of a generalist who does not sufficiently differentiate the functioning of the body and the psyche. Reich thought that the Groddeck’s formulations reinforced a psychoanalytical tendency toward the “psychologizing of the somatic”:18
It culminated in yoga poses unscientific psychologistic interpretations of bodily processes with the aid of the theory of the unconscious. If, e.g., a woman skipped her menstrual period without being pregnant, this was taken as expressing her aversion for her husband or child. According to this concept, practically all physical diseases were due to unconscious wishes or fears. Thus, one acquired cancer, “in order to ;” one perished from tuberculosis because one unconsciously wished to, etc. Peculiarly enough, psychoanalytical experience provided a multitude of observations which seems to confirm this view. The observations were undeniable but critical considerations warned against such conclusions. (Reich, 1940, III.3, 33)
Georg Groddeck can be recognized as the first person to have developed an approach that regularly combines bodywork and a psychotherapeutic approach in yoga poses the same session.19 He especially used different forms of deep massage to influence the system of muscular defense that repressed the expression of emotions. At that time, this way to integrate body and psychotherapy was more widespread than we might think:
In 1931, the 6th congress of the “Common Medical Society for Psychotherapy” met in yoga poses the German town of Dresden. Its general topic was “treating the soul from the body.” The famous Psychiatrist, Ernst Kretschmer, was the chair of this congress.
Psychoanalysts Gustav R. Heyer20 spoke on “Treating the Psyche starting from the Body” and suggested to include gymnastics, sports, breath work and massage into the psychotherapeutic treatment. Other speakers claimed to see psychic as well as somatic phenomena as functions of the entire organism. One speaker went so far as to state that a combined body-mind-therapy would be the future of psychotherapy. Georg Groddeck gave a presentation on “Massage and Psychotherapy,” which is, according to George Downing, one of his finest papers.23(Geuter etal., 2010)
Since then, some body psychotherapists use deep massage in yoga poses a more systematic way, like those who use the massages of Aadel Bulow-Hansen, Gerda Boyesen, or Ida Rolf.
