Das Es

Freud’s unconscious Id is stolen from the life-force of Georg Groddeck’s the It (who stole it from Nietzsche—das Es). Freud confesses as much in a letter to Groddeck: “I do not, of course, recognize my civilized, bourgeois, demystified Id in your It. Yet you know that mine is derived from yours.” While the gothic genre remains entombed within psychoanalysis from its origins much of the field remains rather more optimistic despite Freud’s gloomy bias. Groddeck’s It is case in point. For Groddeck, the It is a life-force of creation that can be channeled: it is eros itself, like the goddess Shakti in Shaivism, it is the cosmic desire that makes the universe: “a wondrous force.”