BIRTH: May have been born in October or November.
Here is an interesting quote about Caroline Koberstein in the book Reading Psychoanalysis: Freud, Rand, Ferenczi, Groddeck by Peter L. Rudnytsky
"4 The profundity of Groddeck's exploration of the mother-child relationship prompts one to wonder about its roots in his personal experience. Beginning with Freud's self-analysis, as I have argued throughout this book, psychoanalytic theory has advanced to the extent that its practitioners have confronted their areas of acutest emotional vulnerability. Besides being a literary masterpiece, The Book of the It bears comparison to The Interpretation of Dreams of the preeminent work of self-analysis in the psychoanalytic canon.41 Like Ferenczi and at least the early Frueud, but unlike the reticent Rank, Groddeck makes explicit subjective dimension of theory-formation in psychoanalysis. As I map the prominent features of Groddeck's psychic landscape, I shall - to borrow Freud's metaphor for condensation in dreams - simultaneously attempt to generate a "composite photograph" (1900,293) that allows us to discern the configurations that link Groddeck's inner world to those of Freud, on one hand, and Winnicott, on the other.
The essential point to bear in mind is that Groddeck's mother, Caroline, appears to have been seriously depressed during his early childhood. As he wrote in his memoir “White as Snow, Red as Blood, Black as Ebony”:“Black as ebony” - that was my mother. Her hair was shining black, and I never saw her wear any but a black dress. She took to black after the death of her father, for she never became a true Groddeck, but only Frau, or perhaps not even that, but always Fräuline Koberstein (1925b, 22)
The blackness of Caroline Groddeck's dress, worn in perpetual mourning after the death in 1870 of her father, the distinguished literary historian and pedagogue August Koberstein, blazons forth her emotional unresponsivemenss to Georg, her youngest child, who was only four at the time. Indeed, Groddeck's title presages André Green's concept of the “dead mother,” which turn on a chromatic contrast between red - the color of blood and the bodily wound of castration - and black and white, the colors, respectively, of the bloodless wounds of mourning and anxiety. In Green's formulation, which can be applied to Caroline Groddeck, “a living object, which was a source of vitality for the child,” is rendered “a distant figure, toneless, practically inanimate” (1983, 146).42
Groddeck concludes his autobiographical sketch by recalling another traumatic memory from the same year of his childhood:
The black-white-red of the woman very early made me into a solitary, for I saw it clearly enough at four years old, when my mother took me into the bath with her. He who seeth his mother's nakedness shall not surely die, but in a sense the mother dies, for him. That comes to all of us, though for most the experience is unconscious. (1925b, 24-25)
By fusing an allusion to the story of Ham, who “saw the nakedness of his father,” Noah (Gen. 9:22), with the serpent's rewording of the divine interdiction on the Tree of Knowledge, “Ye shall not surely die” (Gen. 3:4), Groddeck makes it clear that his mother was psychically dead to him. Although his voyeuristic transgression has a manifestly sexual content, it functions as a screen memory for a diffused sense of emotional abandonment.
To scholars of psychoanalysis, this incident in which Groddeck saw his mother naked in the bath inevitably will recall Freud's own memory of seeing his mother naked during a train trip from Leipzig to Vienna, …
41. For yet another monument of self-analysis, see again (as in chapter 7, note 3, above) my discussion (1991, 115-48) of Harry Guntrip's Psycho-Analytical Autobiography, the longer - and, regrettably, still unpublished - version of his paper (1975) on his analyses with Fairbairn and Winnicott.
42. Superimposed on Groddeck's struggle with the depressed mother is his conflict with the punitive preoedipal mother. This bifold relationship with the maternal imago, which underlies the Oedipus complex, as I have tried to demonstrate, is a pattern found also in Ferenczi, Guntrip, and Norbert Hanold. In Grossman and Grossman's words: Groddeck's attachment to his mother seems a hostile identification, a kind of unity in which there was little room for an identity of his own. His early arrogance and attitudes of omnipotence, as well as his later symptions of psychic turmoil, can be seen as both an expression of and defense against awareness of this unity. He persisted in claiming to be his mother's favorite, yet the defensive denial against a feeling of being unloved appears again and again in his formulations” (1965, 204). Freud, too, always depicted himself as his mother's favorite, a self-image that likewise becomes problematic when it is seen as “the defensive denial against a feeling of being unloved.”
Georg Groddeck ném / ang
1866.10.13 - 1934.06.10
Georg Groddeck was born in 1866 as the youngest of five children of the physician Theodor Groddeck and his wife Caroline (née Koberstein), daughter of the famous historian August Koberstein. He was born in Bad Kösen in Saxony, where his father, an adherent of Bismarck with ultraconservative political views, managed a spa for therapeutic baths. Groddeck attended the boarding school Schulpforta near Naumburg, where Friedrich Nietzsche had also been a pupil, and after graduation he began his medical studies at the University of Berlin. Because he was forced to finance his studies himself after the death of his father, he committed himself to serve as a military physician after his graduation. At the university he came into contact with the famous and controversial "healing artist" and dermatologist Ernst Schweninger, the personal physician of Chancellor Bismarck. Groddeck became Schweninger’s pupil and follower and adopted his physiotherapeutic approach to treatment and his use of suggestion. He completed his studies in 1889, whereupon he worked for a short time at the Charité, the medical school and hospital of the Berlin Humboldt University. After completing his five-year military service, he became the director of Schweninger’s Berlin sanatorium and then in 1897 of his sanatorium in Baden-Baden. In 1900 he opened his own small private sanatorium in the Villa Marienhöhe, which he continued to operate until his death. Through his work with Schweninger, Groddeck had achieved a certain degree of notoriety in bourgeois and aristocratic circles and was as a spa physician highly successful in treating his wealthy clients. In his clinic he primarily treated patients afflicted with tuberculosis and cancer using massages, baths and physiotherapy as well as methods involving suggestion and hypnosis, with which he was successful even in seemingly hopeless cases.
Groddeck also devoted himself to social improvement: in 1911 he founded a consumers’ cooperative, and in 1912 he was among the founding members of a building cooperative in Baden, which devoted its efforts to improving living conditions for underprivileged residents. In his popular lectures, which were well attended by members of both the bourgeois and the working class, he spoke out for a life "in accord with nature" and for bodily hardening, an escape from the cities and folk culture. He also advocated a prohibition against marriage for alcoholics and mentally ill persons and espoused ideas involving eugenics and the preservation of the race (cf. Will 1995, Martynkewicz 2001). He published his lectures in 1913 under the title Nasamecu, an abbreviation for the Latin sentence "Natura sanat, medicus curat" (Nature heals, the physician nurses).
Groddeck became aware of Freud’s theories in 1913, and initially he had a negative attitude toward them. It was the treatment of a difficult patient four years later that brought him into contact with psychoanalysis. In May 1917 he began a correspondence with Freud, and that same year he published an article on the "Psychic Conditioning and the Psychoanalytic Treatment of Organic Disorders" ("Psychische Bedingtheit und psychoanalytische Behandlung organischer Leiden"), whereby he became the founder of psychoanalytically oriented psychosomatics — an appellation that Groddeck himself rejected as too superficial and misleading (Grotjahn 1966, 308). Although Freud considered many of Groddeck’s theories "one-sided", he nonetheless accepted Groddeck, who had neither completed psychoanalytic training nor undergone psychoanalysis and referred to himself as a "wild analyst". As a psychoanalyst Groddeck received the widespread, if often skeptical, attention of his psychoanalytic colleagues, who increasingly rejected his writings, in which he spoke out against strict science and classical medicine. For the rest of his life, Groddeck remained an outsider to the psychoanalytic movement, although he was close friends with several psychoanalysts, particularly Sándor Ferenczi. In his publications Groddeck frequently made public "very unconventional ideas on medicine and psychology that aimed at a reform of the medical profession." At the same time, his writings often contain "elements of intense conservatism" and display Groddeck’s "personal vanity, nationalist egotism, diffuse religiosity and an unrestrained delight in combining divergent elements (...) that at times can also be highly original (...)" (Rattner 1995, 492). Georg Groddeck died on 10 June 1934 in Zurich.
Georg Groddeck attempted to apply Freud’s theories to organic diseases, whereby he stretched the concept of the unconscious to include the organism and spoke out against contemporary medical doctrine and for a holistic approach to treatment. In psychoanalysis he recognized a cure much more effective than conventional medications and physiotherapeutic methods. He was staunchly of the opinion that the physician must make the patient aware of the links between his/her mental conflicts and his/her organic disease and interpret the symbols at the root of all organic diseases, whereby "in his interpretive frenzy he exceeded even the most radical psychoanalysts" (ibid., 497). In 1921 Groddeck ventured into the realm of literature with his novel The Soul-Seeker (Der Seelensucher), which described the travels of its "hero" August Weltlein through prewar German society. In his erotomania and his desire to shock he interpreted each and every event from the sexual perspective. That same year Groddeck began work on The Book of the It (Das Buch vom Es), which was published in 1923. The book was written in a conversational tone and took the form of a collection of letters to a female friend that sketched the theories of psychoanalysis using numerous stories about himself and others, explaining a great variety of bodily and mental disorders and the repressed sexual complexes at their root, whereby he did not hesitate to engage in daring speculation. In this work he introduced the concept of the "It", which he had borrowed from Nietzsche, into psychoanalytic theory, and during the same year Freud took it up in his study The Ego and the Id (1923). Although in English the Latin word id has been firmly established in Freudian terminology since its introduction in the Standard Edition, Freud and Groddeck both used the same German construction, namely the Es (the It). Be that as it may, the concept had a much more extensive significance for Groddeck than it did for Freud. For Groddeck the "It" was an archaic force that unconsciously determines our psychical and physical life: "Man is lived by the It." This is decisive for health and illness, causes symptoms to arise and governs psyche and soma. In therapeutic conversation, the symbolic language of the It must be deciphered and understood "in terms of personal history, sexual psychology and symbolism" (ibid., 504). Because of Groddeck’s notion that illness mostly arises as a consequence of interpersonal problems, the relationship between the patient and the therapist is accorded central significance in Groddeck’s approach. He believed that transference love alone is often enough to lead to the patient’s cure.
In his later works Groddeck also ventured into the fields of linguistics, art and literature, devoting his efforts as a psychoanalytic researcher to discovering the sexual roots of these human forms of expression.
Text: Christiane Rothländer
Translation: Christopher Barber(1947). Georg Groddeck and his Teac... Martin Grotjahn. Psa. Rev., XXXII, 1945, pp. 9–24.. Psychoanal Q., 16:269-270.
(1947). Psychoanalytic Quarterly, 16:269-270
Georg Groddeck and his Teachings about Man's Innate Need for Symbolization (Author's Abstract): A Contribution to the History of Early Psychoanalytic Psychosomatic Medicine. Martin Grotjahn. Psa. Rev., XXXII, 1945, pp. 9–24.
After having reviewed some of Groddeck's outstanding contributions to psychoanalysis, the author states that Groddeck achieved therapeutic results by reactivating and liberating the unconscious, using everyday language and the new terminology of early psychoanalysis as a means of communication. Georg Groddeck is the most outspoken representative of the intuitive type of analyst, in contrast to the learned therapist. It would be wrong to call Groddeck an artist—which he was—in opposition to a scientist—which he also was. The true problem of his personality and work is the interrelation of artistic intuition and scientific knowledge.
There are two basically different personality types among analysts, representing two basically different types of human understanding: the intuitive and the learned. The ideal analyst combines both types, as did Groddeck.
The importance of intuitive ability in the personality of the analyst is not clearly recognized in the psychoanalytic literature, perhaps due to an old anxiety about, and defense against slipping back into medieval mysticism. Theodor Reik succeeded in showing that intuition originates when the analyst uses his unconscious as a perceptive organ. Reik gives a psychological explanation and justification of the intuitive unconscious communication which Groddeck used naïvely.
Groddeck allowed his unconscious to erupt freely—almost as if he were constantly in the process of being analyzed. Only after his ideas, impressions and interpretations emerged did he put them into more or less socially approved forms. He seduced his listeners into following him, he encouraged them to abandon intellectual and logical censorship. He did not convince by reasoning or by facts—his evidence was of a different kind. He convinced by experience of evidence, leaving it up to his pupils to put the knowledge thus gained into the framework of science. The safeguard against the dangers of Georg Groddeck's methods and against losing oneself in wild fantasies is the constant, logical and rational open-eyed observation of the clinical facts.
Freud is not the opposite of Georg Groddeck as a type. Such an approximate opposite is found in the type of person Goethe pictured in Wagner, the pupil of Faust. It is the kind of man who constructs bridges over the unknown and then denies that there is any depth left below them, claiming his bridges to be the only reality. This type of student believes in the omnipotence of learning. The danger of the Groddeck type lies in running off into fantastic mysticism. The danger of the Wagner type lies in his intellectual simplification or, as Groddeck called it, in 'the rape of the divine'.
Article Citation [Who Cited This?]
(1947). Georg Groddeck and his Teachings about Man's Innate Need for Symbolization (Author's Abstract). Psychoanal Q., 16:269-270
36. Julius Hubertus KOBERSTEIN
BIRTH: Also shown as Born Eschwiler, Germany.
birth: 03 NOV 1852 — OBERBRUCH HEINSBERG, RHEINLAND, PRUSSIA
residence: Preu?en, Germany
record title: Germany Births and Baptisms, 1558-1898
name: Julius Hubertus Koberstein
gender: Male
birthplace: OBERBRUCH HEINSBERG,RHEINLAND,PRUSSIA
father's name: Claus Koberstein
mother's name: Anna Catharina Franzen
indexing project (batch) number: C94159-3
system origin: Germany-ODM
source film number: 923148
GIVEN_NAMES: Also shown as Paulina
BIRTHRITE: Also shown as Christening Letmathe, Germany.
DEATH: Lived 12 years
Familienfoto der Nachfahren von Eduard (8.1.4) Koberstein und seiner Frau Hedwig.
Oberste Reihe Emil Hamacher, der Ehemann von Else (8.1.4.1),
Else (8.1.4.1) Hamacher, geb. Koberstein,
Paula (8.1.4.3) Koberstein,
die nachste Person ist nicht bekannt,
Elisabeth, die Frau von Hans *8.1.4.2) Koberstein,
die nachste Person ist nicht bekannt,
Hans (8.1.4.2) Koberstein:Untere Reihe:
Maria, die Frau von Otto (8.1.4.4) Koberstein,
Hetel (8.1.4.1.1) Hamacher, verh. Kremer,
Irmgard (8.1.4.1.2) Hamacher, verh. Fischer.record title: Germany Births and Baptisms, 1558-1898
name: Eduard Koberstein
gender: Male
baptism/christening date: 27 Jun 1856
birth date: 27 Jun 1856
birthplace: Liedberg, Rheinland, Preußen, Germany
father's name: Claus Koberstein
mother's name: Elisabeth Frantzen
indexing project (batch) number: C95397-2
system origin: Germany-EASy
source film number: 995745
Name: Joseph Koberstein
Gender: Male
Christening date: 16 Jan 1872
Christening place: CIVIL, GREVENBROICH, RHEINLAND, PRUSSIA
Residence: Grevenbroich, Rheinland, Preussen
Father name: Olaus Koberstein
Mother name: Elisabeth Franzen
Batch number: C96151-6
Date range: 1871 - 1876
Record group: Germany-VR
Film number: 958150
Collection: Germany Baptisms 1700-1900