THE WILD ANALYST

When Georg Groddeck spoke for the first time at a psychoanalytic meeting, he called himself with a kind of defensive twinkle, ""the wild analyst,"" then went rambling on to the consternation of everyone except Freud. Fiercely independent, unorthodox, imaginative, he is remembered every now and then as the author of an underground classic, The Book of the It, which besides influencing Auden's generation, bears some priority-prestige. ""In your It I do not recognize my civilized, bourgeois Id,"" wrote Freud, ""However, you know that mine is derived from yours."" The Grossmans make a great deal of this, relying heavily on the correspondence between the two and suggesting a parallel in their relationship to that of the Freud-Fleiss one, which surely one would think was of a different order. There are amusing bits (Groddeck as the droll disciplinarian of his Baden-Baden clinic sometimes resembles those madcap cure-all doctors of Auntie Mame or Candy); there are also long-winded documentations acclaiming the man as a pioneer of psychosomatic medicine. It is all done with serious intent and a corrective fervor of sorts, but the controversial Groddeck demands something more than this slack, styleless valentine.