FOLLOW GEORG

 

GEORG practices thermal medicine and specialises in psychotherapy. To this he adds a passionate interest in adapted gastronomy for modern spa visitors, which leads him to write a specialist blog. Now in his fifties, he set up his doctor’s office in the centre of Rome, in an apartment that he inherited from his grandfather. He makes frequent trips to Germany, from where his family originates, and to central Europe, where he gives conferences on new therapeutic approaches related to alternative medicine. He is an epicurean, a calm and ordered man, and an art collector.

 

Commissioned by the PUBLISHER and guided by VALERY, GEORG discusses day-by-day his frequent stays in the various European thermal towns, his encounters and the treatments which he analyses. He meets Clara by chance one new year’s eve in Rome while she is struggling to get over a complicated musical and romantic engagement. He decides to help her forget this sad experience by taking her with him on a journey to The Sources of Europe, thus giving her the chance to meet composers from the past whom she would like to speak to, in the aim of becoming a concert pianist.

 

Through the chances to time travel which the PUBLISHER grants him, he establishes regular contact with GEORG GRODDECK (1866-1934), one of the fathers of psychoanalytical thinking who set up shop in Baden-Baden in 1900, where he treated patients by use of hydrotherapy, dieting and massage in a clinic named the ‘Sanatorium’. A correspondent of Sigmund Freud, he wrote, among others, The Book of the It, which was made up of letters exchanged between Groddeck and a female patient on the method of analytical conversation.