Otto Gross

Dear Sir,

I am writing to you because some information about my recent research might be of interest for the readers of your journal.

Although the Austrian psychoanalyst Otto Gross (1977–1920) played a pivotal role in the birth of what today we are calling modernity, with wide-ranging influences in analysis, psychiatry, literature, and sociology, he has remained virtually unknown to this day. To a large extent, this is the result of an analytic historiography which Erich Fromm has rightly called ‘Stalinistic’ (Fromm, 1989, p. 195): dissidents become non-persons and vanish from the records.

Yet there was a time, in the first decades of this century, when the greatest minds in analysis were full of the highest praise for Otto Gross. In 1908 Freud wrote to Jung, ‘You are really the only one capable of making an original contribution; except perhaps O. Gross’ (Freudl Jung Letters, p. 126, ed. McGuire, 1974). A few months later, after his mutual analysis with Gross, Jung replied to Freud, ‘In Gross I discovered many aspects of my own nature, so that he often seemed like my twin brother’ (p. 156). In 1910 Ferenczi wrote to Freud about Gross, ‘There is no doubt that, among those who have followed you up to now, he is the most significant’ (Correspondence Freudl Ferenczi, Vol. I, p. 154, ed. Brabant et al., 1993). In 1912 Alfred Adler referred to Gross as ‘brilliant’ (Adler, 1997, p. 58). Both Karl Abraham and Ferenczi reviewed Gross' works (Abraham, 1905; Ferenczi, 1920). Wilhelm Stekel spoke of the ‘ingenious Otto Gross’ (Stekel, 1923, p. 464). And in Free Associations, the autobiography Ernest Jones was working on at the end of his life, he wrote, Gross ‘was my first instructor in the technique of psychoanalysis’ and called him ‘the nearest approach to the romantic ideal of a genius I have ever met’ (Jones, 1959, p. 173f).

One generation before Wilhelm Reich, Otto Gross was the first analyst to emphasise the dialectical interdependence between individual inner change on the