who's in here?



Otto Gross was the first analyst to emphasise the dialectical interdependence between individual inner change on the one hand and collective political change on the other.

Gross perceived the individual within the dynamics of the nuclear family and was the first to empathize deeply with the child in this conflict. And he recognized the way in which family structures that violate the individual reflect those of patriarchal society. For him the concept of the orgy described the space in which individual and collective liberation could become possible within the framework of a matriarchal ritual. Thus the idea of the orgy became his term for a sacralization of radical politics.

Gross did influence the course of analytic theory and clinical practice to the present day. He was a 'pioneer of life experiment' (Green, 1998, Introduction) and tried to live his radical ideas in both his private and his professional life - which he refused to separate. Thus he became unacceptable to those trying to establish the credibility of analysis as a science in the eyes of society and academe in the early years of this century. Already in 1921, less than a year after his death, the writer Anton Kuh wrote of Gross as 'a man known only to very few by name - apart from a handful of psychiatrists and secret policemen - and among those few only to those who plucked his feathers to adorn their own posteriors' (Kuh, 1921, pp. 161f.).



oder auch:

»Das Ziel wird die Befreiung der Liebe von der Sabotage durch die latenten Autoritätsmotive sein, das passive wie das aktive, die Unterwerfungsbereitschaft wie den Willen zur Macht.«

desweiteren-

Otto Gross - Leben, Werk und Wirkung