The soul seeker was the only novel written by Georg Groddeck, one of the founding fathers of the psychoanalytic movement. Rejected initially by numerous publishing houses that were scandalized by its content, it was Sigmund Freud who in 1919 published it in the official publisher of the psychoanalytic movement, Psychoanalytischer Verlag, welcoming the author with the following lines: "We should all thank him By the delightful smile with which, in his Seeker of souls, he has represented our inquiries about the soul, yet always so serious. "

Inscribed in the tradition of the picaresque novel, The Seeker of Souls tells the story of August Müller, a middle-aged bourgeois who leads a conventional life until he suffers from scarlet fever and develops an obsession with bedbugs in his room, Which it intends to exterminate by all means. From there he embarks on a delirium that will transform him into Thomas Weltlein, living incarnation of repressed thoughts, desires and impulses that make up what in psychoanalysis is known as the It, or also as the Unconscious. Driven into life by a "free association of nonsense," Weltlein unleashes chaos in breweries, trade union assemblies, and literary salons, in the face of the perplexed gaze of rigid Germanic society, ranging from misunderstanding and scandal to Weltlein's practice of a Nietzschean maxim: seeing the world head first through one's legs.