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Otto Gross
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Gross
Otto Hans Adolf Gross (17 March 1877 – 13 February 1920) was an Austrian psychoanalyst. A maverick early disciple of Sigmund Freud, he later became an anarchist and joined the utopian Ascona community.
His father Hans Gross was a judge turned pioneering criminologist. Otto initially collaborated with him, and then turned against his determinist ideas on character.[1]
A champion of an early form of anti-psychiatry and sexual liberation, he also developed an anarchist form of depth psychology (which rejected the civilising necessity of psychological repression proposed by Freud). He adopted a modified form of the proto-feminist and neo-pagan theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen,[2] with which he attempted to return civilization to a 'golden age' of non-hierarchy. Gross was ostracized from the larger psychoanalytic movement, and was not included in histories of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishments. He died in poverty.
Greatly influenced by the philosophy of Max Stirner[3] and Friedrich Nietzsche and the political theories of Peter Kropotkin, he in turn influenced D. H. Lawrence (through Gross's affair with Frieda von Richthofen), Franz Kafka and other artists, including Franz Jung and other founders of Berlin Dada. His influence on psychology was more limited. Carl Jung claimed his entire worldview changed when he attempted to analyse Gross and partially had the tables turned on him.[4]
He became addicted to drugs in South America where he served as a naval doctor. He was hospitalized several times for drug addiction, sometimes losing his guardianship of himself to his father in the process.[5] As a Bohemian drug user from youth, as well as an advocate of free love, he is sometimes credited as a founding grandfather of 20th-century counterculture.
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"The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution ... It is called upon to enable an inner freedom, called upon as preparation for the revolution" (Otto Gross). Psychoanalyst G.M. Heuer's compelling discussion of Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung, noting the difficulties of developing a more radical and liberational project for psychoanalysis under bourgeois, repressive, ego-based capitalism (aka the IPA).
As Heuer notes, Gross himself - like many of the best analysts - was expelled from the IPA (including Wilhelm Reich, who was forced out by Ernest Jones and Anna Freud, and Jacques Lacan, whose colleagues "saw IPA as bureaucrats who had betrayed psychoanalysis in favour of an adaptive psychology in the service of triumphant capitalism").
"It is interesting to note here that, writing about the expulsion ‘from Freud’s circle and/or the International Psychoanalytic Association ... of Otto Gross, a communitarian anarchist, Wilhelm Reich, an erstwhile communist, and Erich Fromm, a life-long socialist’, Burston uses the term ‘purged’.
Yet there was a time, in the first decade of this century, when the greatest minds in analysis were full of the highest praise for Otto Gross. In 1908, Jung wrote to Freud, ‘in Gross I experienced all too many aspects of my own nature, so that he often seemed like my twin brother’, (Freud/Jung Letters). A few months earlier, Freud had written to Jung ‘You are really the only one capable of making an original contribution; except perhaps for Otto Gross’.
In 1908 Ernest Jones met Gross in Munich. In his autobiography that he was working on at the end of his life, Jones recalled, Gross ‘was my first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis’. In 1910, Ferenczi wrote about Gross to Freud, ‘There is no doubt that, among those who have followed you up to now, he is the most significant’. In 1912, Alfred Adler referred to Gross as ‘brilliant’, and both Karl Abraham and Ferenczi repeatedly reviewed Gross’ works.
For Gross, psychoanalysis was a weapon in a countercultural revolution to overthrow the existing order – not, as he saw it becoming, a means to force people to adapt better to it. He wrote, 'The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution ... It is called upon to enable an inner freedom, called upon as preparation for the revolution'.
Nicolaus Sombart summarizes two main points: His first thesis was: ‘The realization of the anarchist alternative to the patriarchal order of society has to begin with the destruction of the latter ... His second thesis: Whoever wants to change the structures of power (and production) in a repressive society, has to start by changing these structures in himself and to eradicate the "authority that has infiltrated one’s own inner being". In his opinion it is the achievement of psychoanalysis as a science to have created the preconditions and to have provided the instruments for this' (Sombart, 1991)’.
My hypothesis is that Gross has remained relatively unknown to this day because of this radical critique and, above all, because of the implications of his insistence that there is no individual change without collective change and vice versa.
In his interaction with Freud, Gross challenged the way psychoanalytic practice was beholden to the medical model in its attempt at a non-engaged objectivity in terms of the interpersonal relationship between analyst and patient.
In opposition to Freud’s recommendation that the analyst work as if he were an ‘opaque mirror’ (Freud 1912, p. 118), Gross referred to what he called ‘the will to relating’. For him this stood ‘in opposition to the will to power, and it needs to be uncovered as the elementary contrast between the revolutionary and the adjusted - bourgeois - psyche and it has to be presented as the highest and true goal of the revolution’.
These ideas need to be regarded in the light of early developments in the establishment of what was later to become object relations theory (cf. Suttie 1933; Fairbairn 1952). Gross’ position anticipates those of Suttie and Fairbairn, both of whom he preceded.
Otto Gross was probably the first psychoanalyst to see that an analytic perspective needed to include an appreciation of the social context within which clinical work takes place. Thus he saw the necessity of linking internal, intrapsychic, change with external social and political change - to the enhancement of both ends of that much-disputed spectrum.
At the First Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg in 1908, Freud tried explicitly to curb Gross’ efforts in this direction by admonishing him, ‘We are physicians, and physicians we want to remain’.
As Sombart puts it: 'Twenty years before Wilhelm Reich and forty years before Herbert Marcuse, Otto Gross was the man who developed in his psychotherapeutic practice the theoretical bases of the "sexual revolution", (the term comes from him, if we are to believe Werfel) - the theory of the freeing of the erotic potential of the human being as a precondition of any social or political emancipation'.
Bernd Laska notes that Gross was not the only one at that Salzburg congress who linked discoveries about the making of the unconscious with discoveries about the structure of societies and their effects on individuals. In his paper 'Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy', delivered at the congress, Ferenczi, speaking about ‘the holding on to absurd religious superstition and the customs of the cult of authority, the clinging to decrepit institutions of society’, stated that ‘liberation from unnecessary inner coercion would be the first revolution that would create a true relief, whereas political revolutions usually just dealt with outer powers, i.e. means of coercion, changing hands’. Freud ‘refused to give any comment, though urgently requested.
Many of Gross’ innovative ideas and concepts seem to have been forgotten. In the areas of gender, sexuality, the mind/body-split, and, specifically, the dialectical linking of analysis with politics, Gross posed radical challenges that continue to be burning issues because satisfying solutions have yet to be found.
It is important that we face these challenges today and a careful study which casts a retrospective glance at Gross’ life, his work, and the influence he has had on other analysts, can not only contribute to giving Gross his rightful place in the history of analysis but also further the contemporary exploration of issues that Gross was the first to raise."
Read the full article here:
Jung's twin brother. Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung
December 2002The Journal of analytical psychology 46(4):655 - 688
DOI: 10.1111/1465-5922.00272
www.researchgate.net/publication/229559425_Jung's_twin_brother_Otto_Gross_and_Carl_Gustav_Jung
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Gross
Otto Hans Adolf Gross (17 March 1877 – 13 February 1920) was an Austrian psychoanalyst. A maverick early disciple of Sigmund Freud, he later became an anarchist and joined the utopian Ascona community.
His father Hans Gross was a judge turned pioneering criminologist. Otto initially collaborated with him, and then turned against his determinist ideas on character.[1]
A champion of an early form of anti-psychiatry and sexual liberation, he also developed an anarchist form of depth psychology (which rejected the civilising necessity of psychological repression proposed by Freud). He adopted a modified form of the proto-feminist and neo-pagan theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen,[2] with which he attempted to return civilization to a 'golden age' of non-hierarchy. Gross was ostracized from the larger psychoanalytic movement, and was not included in histories of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishments. He died in poverty.
Greatly influenced by the philosophy of Max Stirner[3] and Friedrich Nietzsche and the political theories of Peter Kropotkin, he in turn influenced D. H. Lawrence (through Gross's affair with Frieda von Richthofen), Franz Kafka and other artists, including Franz Jung and other founders of Berlin Dada. His influence on psychology was more limited. Carl Jung claimed his entire worldview changed when he attempted to analyse Gross and partially had the tables turned on him.[4]
He became addicted to drugs in South America where he served as a naval doctor. He was hospitalized several times for drug addiction, sometimes losing his guardianship of himself to his father in the process.[5] As a Bohemian drug user from youth, as well as an advocate of free love, he is sometimes credited as a founding grandfather of 20th-century counterculture.
_____________________________________________
"The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution ... It is called upon to enable an inner freedom, called upon as preparation for the revolution" (Otto Gross). Psychoanalyst G.M. Heuer's compelling discussion of Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung, noting the difficulties of developing a more radical and liberational project for psychoanalysis under bourgeois, repressive, ego-based capitalism (aka the IPA).
As Heuer notes, Gross himself - like many of the best analysts - was expelled from the IPA (including Wilhelm Reich, who was forced out by Ernest Jones and Anna Freud, and Jacques Lacan, whose colleagues "saw IPA as bureaucrats who had betrayed psychoanalysis in favour of an adaptive psychology in the service of triumphant capitalism").
"It is interesting to note here that, writing about the expulsion ‘from Freud’s circle and/or the International Psychoanalytic Association ... of Otto Gross, a communitarian anarchist, Wilhelm Reich, an erstwhile communist, and Erich Fromm, a life-long socialist’, Burston uses the term ‘purged’.
Yet there was a time, in the first decade of this century, when the greatest minds in analysis were full of the highest praise for Otto Gross. In 1908, Jung wrote to Freud, ‘in Gross I experienced all too many aspects of my own nature, so that he often seemed like my twin brother’, (Freud/Jung Letters). A few months earlier, Freud had written to Jung ‘You are really the only one capable of making an original contribution; except perhaps for Otto Gross’.
In 1908 Ernest Jones met Gross in Munich. In his autobiography that he was working on at the end of his life, Jones recalled, Gross ‘was my first instructor in the technique of psycho-analysis’. In 1910, Ferenczi wrote about Gross to Freud, ‘There is no doubt that, among those who have followed you up to now, he is the most significant’. In 1912, Alfred Adler referred to Gross as ‘brilliant’, and both Karl Abraham and Ferenczi repeatedly reviewed Gross’ works.
For Gross, psychoanalysis was a weapon in a countercultural revolution to overthrow the existing order – not, as he saw it becoming, a means to force people to adapt better to it. He wrote, 'The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution ... It is called upon to enable an inner freedom, called upon as preparation for the revolution'.
Nicolaus Sombart summarizes two main points: His first thesis was: ‘The realization of the anarchist alternative to the patriarchal order of society has to begin with the destruction of the latter ... His second thesis: Whoever wants to change the structures of power (and production) in a repressive society, has to start by changing these structures in himself and to eradicate the "authority that has infiltrated one’s own inner being". In his opinion it is the achievement of psychoanalysis as a science to have created the preconditions and to have provided the instruments for this' (Sombart, 1991)’.
My hypothesis is that Gross has remained relatively unknown to this day because of this radical critique and, above all, because of the implications of his insistence that there is no individual change without collective change and vice versa.
In his interaction with Freud, Gross challenged the way psychoanalytic practice was beholden to the medical model in its attempt at a non-engaged objectivity in terms of the interpersonal relationship between analyst and patient.
In opposition to Freud’s recommendation that the analyst work as if he were an ‘opaque mirror’ (Freud 1912, p. 118), Gross referred to what he called ‘the will to relating’. For him this stood ‘in opposition to the will to power, and it needs to be uncovered as the elementary contrast between the revolutionary and the adjusted - bourgeois - psyche and it has to be presented as the highest and true goal of the revolution’.
These ideas need to be regarded in the light of early developments in the establishment of what was later to become object relations theory (cf. Suttie 1933; Fairbairn 1952). Gross’ position anticipates those of Suttie and Fairbairn, both of whom he preceded.
Otto Gross was probably the first psychoanalyst to see that an analytic perspective needed to include an appreciation of the social context within which clinical work takes place. Thus he saw the necessity of linking internal, intrapsychic, change with external social and political change - to the enhancement of both ends of that much-disputed spectrum.
At the First Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg in 1908, Freud tried explicitly to curb Gross’ efforts in this direction by admonishing him, ‘We are physicians, and physicians we want to remain’.
As Sombart puts it: 'Twenty years before Wilhelm Reich and forty years before Herbert Marcuse, Otto Gross was the man who developed in his psychotherapeutic practice the theoretical bases of the "sexual revolution", (the term comes from him, if we are to believe Werfel) - the theory of the freeing of the erotic potential of the human being as a precondition of any social or political emancipation'.
Bernd Laska notes that Gross was not the only one at that Salzburg congress who linked discoveries about the making of the unconscious with discoveries about the structure of societies and their effects on individuals. In his paper 'Psychoanalysis and Pedagogy', delivered at the congress, Ferenczi, speaking about ‘the holding on to absurd religious superstition and the customs of the cult of authority, the clinging to decrepit institutions of society’, stated that ‘liberation from unnecessary inner coercion would be the first revolution that would create a true relief, whereas political revolutions usually just dealt with outer powers, i.e. means of coercion, changing hands’. Freud ‘refused to give any comment, though urgently requested.
Many of Gross’ innovative ideas and concepts seem to have been forgotten. In the areas of gender, sexuality, the mind/body-split, and, specifically, the dialectical linking of analysis with politics, Gross posed radical challenges that continue to be burning issues because satisfying solutions have yet to be found.
It is important that we face these challenges today and a careful study which casts a retrospective glance at Gross’ life, his work, and the influence he has had on other analysts, can not only contribute to giving Gross his rightful place in the history of analysis but also further the contemporary exploration of issues that Gross was the first to raise."
Read the full article here:
Jung's twin brother. Otto Gross and Carl Gustav Jung
December 2002The Journal of analytical psychology 46(4):655 - 688
DOI: 10.1111/1465-5922.00272
www.researchgate.net/publication/229559425_Jung's_twin_brother_Otto_Gross_and_Carl_Gustav_Jung