On 16 April 2008 Stephen Black wrote:
>Interestingly, Dewey attributes the source of Freud's id to one
>Georg Groddick in his "The Book of It", a claim I haven't seen
>before. Astoundingly, Wikipedia claims that Freud, well-known
>for anal-retentiveness where credit is concerned, actually himself
>credited Groddick for this insight. Doubtless a Freud scholar,
>if only we had one on this list, would be able to comment.
Checking the index of Allen Esterson's *Seductive Mirage: An Exploration of
the Work of Sigmund Freud*, I see that that author does indeed point out
that Freud ascribed the use of the term 'das Es' to Groddeck ("New
Introductory Lectures", SE 22, p. 72). [German 'Es' = 'It', translated by
Freud's official translator James Strachey as 'Id', presumably with the
approval of Freud.]
Freud also notes that Groddeck himself was following a verbal usage by
Nietzsche, who, according to William McDougall (1936), used the term with
the meaning "the sum of the instinctive or innate dispositions".
I note that Russell Dewey also writes that "Freud described the ego,
drawing power from the id while controlling it, as resembling a rider on a
horse". This apparently has a much more ancient lineage. Of Freud's usage
McDougall writes: "Here we are back at Plato's doctrine of Reason as the
charioteer who guides the fierce unruly horses, the passions, which are the
motive powers."
Minor point: On Dewey's "Iceberg" page he suggests that "addiction to
cocaine... may also account for Freud's bouts of depression in later years
-- another typical side effect of long-term cocaine use". But although
Freud evidently used cocaine intermittently over a period of about a
decade, he was never addicted to it, and there is no evidence he took it
after about 1897.
It's very unlikely that any depressive episodes many years later can be
attributed to his use of cocaine. (After his evangelistic phase in the
mid-1880s when he took cocaine orally, Freud's letters to Wilhelm Fliess
indicate he occasionally applied cocaine to his nose to relieve migraines,
nasal inflammations, and depression.)
http://www.intropsych.com/ch11_personality/super-ego.html
Allen Esterson
Former lecturer, Science Department
Southwark College, London
http://www.esterson.org
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