Otto Hans Adolph Gross was born on March 17, 1877 in Gnibing, near Feldbach in Styria, Austria. His father, Hans Gross, was a professor of forensic science and one of the leading authorities worldwide in this field. He, for example, is often regarded as the creator of fingerprinting, the science of interpreting and using fingerprints. The son of the well-known criminalist, who will be discussed in this article, has earned so much controversial fame that there is quite little information about him even on the Internet, and even that is full of frank “blackmail”. There are almost no intravital photos of Austrian psychologist Otto Gross.
Youth, drug addiction and acquaintance with Freud
Otto Gross was educated by private teachers. He became a doctor in 1899 and in 1900 went as a naval doctor to South America. At the same time, he was addicted to drugs. In 1902, he worked as a psychiatrist and medical assistant in Munich and Graz, published his first work and began treatment for drug addiction in the Burgholsley clinic near Zurich.
His initial contact with Freud was either at this time, or in 1904. Writer Franz Jung (namesake K. G. Jung) claims that Gross became Freud's assistant much earlier, but there is no evidence that Gross had any contact with Freud until 1904, with the exception of the passage in Franz Jung's letter to Freud “I want Gross to be able to return to you, this time as a patient.”
Marriage and personal life
The intimate biography of Otto Gross began at the very beginning of the last century. In 1903 he married Fried Schlöffer and in 1906 was invited as a professor of psychopathology at the University of Graz. The following year, his son Peter was born, as well as his second son, also named Peter, from his relationship with Elsa Jaffe, nee Elsa von Richthofen. In the same year, Gross had an affair with his sister Else Frida Wickley, who later married D.H. Lawrence.
By then, Gross lived in Munich and Ascon, Switzerland, where he had a great influence on many expressionist authors and artists such as Karl Otten and Franz Werfel, as well as anarchists and political radicals such as Erich Müsum, who later proclaimed the republic for the first time. during the Munich Revolution of 1919. In 1908, Gross underwent further treatment at Burghelsley, where he was analyzed by C. G. Jung - and, in turn, analyzed it himself. In the same year, his daughter Camilla was born, who was the fruit of a relationship with the Swiss writer Regina Ullmann, who later became a close friend of Rilke.
War years
Gross was later analyzed by Wilhelm Stäckel in 1914, and the latter declared him cured, but nevertheless recommended that he remain under the care of his father for some time. My father died a year later, in 1915, when Gross was a military doctor, first in Slavonia, and then in Temesvar, Romania, where he even headed a typhoid hospital.
Together with Franz Jung, artist Georg Shrimpf and others, Gross founded a magazine called Die freie Strasse ("Free Road"), positioning it as "preparatory work for the revolution." He began a relationship with Marianne Kuh, one of the sisters of the Austrian writer Anton Kuh, and in 1916 they had a daughter, Sophie. Due to drug addiction, Gross fell into limited custody again in 1917 and underwent another course of treatment. He planned to marry Marianne, although he had a relationship not only with her sister Nina, but possibly with her third sister Margaret.
Death
He died of pneumonia on February 13, 1920 in Berlin after he was found hungry and frozen on the street. In one of the few positive obituaries that were published, Otto Kaus wrote: “The best revolutionary ideas in Germany were educated and directly inspired by him. In a large number of powerful creations of the young generation, he finds his ideas with this particular acuteness and those far-reaching consequences that he could inspire. ”
With the exception of William Stöckel, who wrote a brief praise published in the New York Times (Stekel, 1920), the world ignored the demise of this exile and rebel from psychiatry. At the Eighth International Psychoanalytic Congress in Salzburg, four years later, Gross was mentioned in passing, but in general he remained an incomprehensible and underrated thinker. There are almost no intravital photos of Otto Gross.
Main ideas
What were Gross's ideas that contributed to the development of analytic theory and practice, and what made this person non grata in the academic community?
He wrote in favor of the freedom and equality of women and advocated the free choice of partners and the new forms of relationships that he hailed as free from the use of force and violence. He established links between these issues and hierarchical structures in the wider context of society and began to consider individual suffering as an integral part of universal human suffering.
The fight against patriarchy
In his struggle against the patriarchy in all its manifestations, the Austrian psychologist Otto Gross was fascinated by the ideas of Bachofen and other supporters of matriarchy. “The coming revolution is a revolution for right-wing mothers,” he wrote in 1913. He focused on sexuality, but soon began to doubt Freud's theory that it was the only cause of neurosis.
In contrast to Freud's view of the limits imposed on the human psyche by the unconscious, Gross saw pathologies as subconscious forces rooted in more positive and creative trends. He wrote a lot about homosexuality in both men and women and spoke out against its discrimination. For Gross, psychoanalysis was a weapon in the counter-cultural revolution with the goal of overthrowing the existing order, and not a means of forcing people to adapt to it. He wrote: “The psychology of the unconscious is a philosophy of revolution. It is called upon to ensure inner freedom, which is a readiness for revolution. ”
Holism
He saw the body and mind as a whole, wrote that every mental process is physiological at the same time. Otto Gross is one of those researchers who refute the division of the world into physical and spiritual-intellectual spheres. For them, the body and soul are manifestations of the same process, and therefore a person can only be seen holistically.