man’s true profession is to become a human being

I run a sanatorium which is visited by people who do not find help in other places. Sometimes I am lucky with these difficult cases, sometimes not. I am a pupil of Schweninger, who was, perhaps, the greatest doctor of the last century. Following in his footsteps I suddenly found myself, without knowing it, faced with the necessity of evaluating unconscious processes in the treatment of organic diseases. When a few years later I came upon Freud’s works I had to give up the idea that I was a discoverer myself, not without a struggle. For it became apparent that I had first read about these in a notice in the daily paper Rundschau. The only achievement I can claim for myself with some justification is the introduction of a knowledge of the unconscious into the treatment of all patients, and particularly those patients who suffer from organic illnesses, and that I am as aware as Freud that psychoanalysis is a world-wide affair and only partly a medical affair and that its tie-up with medicine is a disaster. I do not have a title, but there are people who love me and I have insights which make my life harmonious in so far as that is possible at all. I cannot send a prospectus of my small clinic — 15 rooms— where I am assisted by my wife, not only in the household. There is no prospectus. My charges are adjusted to the means of my patients, in the treatment I rely on my head and on my hands and on the view that every patient has his or her own illness and that the person who wants to help them has to practice the saying: nil humanum a me alienum esse puto (I believe that nothing human is strange to me) and also on the exhortation: Children, love one another! I have patients of all kinds; I am not a specialist, but a general practitioner with the knowledge and experience gathered in an active professional life. And I may perhaps be allowed to say that I have not forgotten during my life as a doctor that man’s true profession is to become a human being.

Georg Groddeck; Letter to Professor Hans Vaihinger, May 8, 1930, in Der Mensch und sein Es, pp. 125-6.