Id

   The word "unconscious" (das Unbewusste) was familiar in nineteenth-century Central European psychiatry. Freud used it from his earliest writings (1888 in Albert Villaret’s Dictionary of Medicine [Handwörterbuch der gesamten Medizin] being apparently his first mention of it). Yet, the psychoanalytic term for the unconscious layer of the psyche referred to as the id was introduced into analysis in 1917 by Georg Groddeck (1866–1934), owner of the private sanatorium Villa Marienhöhe in Baden-Baden and amateur of Freud’s ideas. In a book on The Psychic Predetermination and Psychoanalytic Treatment of Organic Illness (Psychische Bedingtheit und psychoanalytische Behandlung organischer Leiden) that he published in Leipzig in 1917, Groddeck said, "In the discussion of individual dispositions, I want to call attention to one feature of the human unconscious, of the id (das Es), which one might term the ‘cautiousness of the id’; indeed I am almost inclined to use the expression, ‘the reason of the id,’ so similar are its expressions to those of the conscious mind, only that they are far more powerful" (Schriften, 70). In his 1923 book, Ego and Id (Das Ich und das Es), Freud decided to follow Groddeck’s usage: "An individual is now for us a psychic id, unknown and unconscious, and the ego sits superficially on the id . . . not entirely enveloping it, in that way that an [embryonic] germinal disk rests on an egg" (Gesammelte Werke, XIII, p. 251).