Otto Gross
(1877-1920)
Otto Hans Adolf Gross (also Grob) was born 17 March 1877 in Gniebing near Feldbach in Styria, Austria. His father Hans (or Hanns) Gross was a professor of criminality and one of the leading authorities worldwide in this field. (He is, for example, seen as the originator of dactyloscopy, the science of interpreting and using finger prints.)
Gross was mostly educated by private tutors and in private schools. He became a medical doctor in 1899 and travelled as a naval doctor to South America in 1900 at which time he became addicted to drugs. In 190102 he worked as a psychiatrist and assistant doctor in Munich and Graz, published his first papers and had his first treatment for drug addiction at the Burghölzli Clinic near Zürich. His initial contact with Freud was either at this time or by 1904 at the latest. The writer Franz Jung (no relation to C.G. Jung) claims that Gross became Freud's assistant much earlier than that but there is no evidence that Gross had any contact with Freud before 1904 other than his (F. Jung, 1923, P. 21) (2) , except for a passage in a letter to Freud from C.G. Jung after his treatment of Gross, "I wish Gross could go back to you, this time as a patient" (Freud / Jung Letters, p. 161; my emphasis).
In 1903 he married Frieda Schloffer and was offered a chair in psychopathology at Graz university in 1906. The following year his son Peter was born as well as a second son, also named Peter, from his relationship with Else Jaffé, born Else von Richthofen. In the same year Gross had an affair with Else's sister, Frieda Weekley, who later married D.H. Lawrence. By that time Gross lived in Munich and Ascona, Switzerland, where he had an important influence on many of the expressionist writers and artists such as Karl Otten and Franz Werfel as well as anarchists and political radicals, like Erich Mühsam, who later was the first to proclaim the republic during the Munich Revolution of 1919. In 1908 Gross had further treatment at the Burghölzli where he was analysed by C.G. Jung - and, in turn, analysed Jung. In the same year his daughter Camilla was born from his relationship to the Swiss writer Regina Ullmann, who later became a close friend of Rilke.
In 1911 Gross was forcibly interned in a psychiatric institution. He subsequently wanted to found a school for anarchists in Ascona and he wrote to the Swiss medical doctor and anarchist Fritz Brupbacher that he had plans to publish a "Journal on the psychological problems of anarchism". Two years later he lived in Berlin where he had a considerable influence on Franz Jung (the writer), Raoul Hausman, Hannah Höch and the other artists who created Berlin Dada. His father had Gross arrested as a dangerous anarchist and interned in a psychiatric institution in Austria. By the time he was freed following an international press campaign initiated by his friends, Gross had become one of the psychiatrists working at the hospital. Together with Franz Kafka Gross planned to publish "Blätter gegen den Machtwillen" (Journal Against the Will to Power). Legally declared to be of diminished responsibility, Gross was analyzed by Wilhelm Stekel in 1914 (cf. Stekel, 1925), declared cured but placed legally under the trusteeship of his father who died a year later, in 1915, when Gross was a military doctor first in Slavonia and then in Temesvar, Romania, where he was head of a typhus hospital. Together with Franz Jung, the painter Georg Schrimpf and others, Gross published a journal called "Die freie Strasse" (The Free Road) as a "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 he had a daughter by her, Sophie. Because of his drug addiction, Gross was again put into a psychiatric institution under limited guardianship in 1917. He planned to marry Marianne, although he had a relationship not only with her sister, Nina, too, but, possibly, with the third sister, Margarethe, as well (Templer-Kuh, 1998). He died of pneumonia on 13 February 1920 in Berlin after having been found in the street near-starved and frozen. In one of the very few eulogies that were published, Otto Kaus wrote, "Germany's best revolutionary spirits have been educated and directly inspired by him. In a considerable number of powerful creations by the young generation one finds his ideas with that specific keenness and those far-reaching consequences that he was able to inspire" (1920, p. 55). Except for Wilhelm Stekel, who wrote a brief eulogy, published in New York (Stekel, 1920), but who was a psychoanalytic outcast himself by that time, and a mere announcement of Gross' death by Ernest Jones at the Eighth International Psycho-Analytical Congress in Salzburg four years later, the analytic world remained silent, a silence that has, with very few exceptions, effectively lasted to this day.
Source: The International Otto Gross Society.
Major Works of Otto Gross
- On the Cardio-Renal Theories
- Compendium of Pharmaco-Therapy for Policlinicians and Young Physicians
- On the Question of Mental Representations of Social Inhibition
- On the Disintegration of Mental Representation
- On the Phyllogenesis of Ethics
- The Cerebral Secondary Function
- The Affect-Situation of Rejection
- Contributions to the Pathology of Negativism
- On the Pathogenesis of the Specific Delusion of Paralytics
- A Case of Death as Consequence of a Latent Aneurysm Arteriae Vertebralis
- On the Disintegration of Consciousness
- On the Biology of the Speech Apparatus
- On the Differential Diagnostics of Negativistic Phenomena
- On the Nomenclature "Dementia sejunctiva"
- The Freudian Moment of ldeogenity and its Meaning in Kraepelin's Manic Depressive Psychosis
- The Cerebral Secondary Function. Talk
- Contributions to Discussions
- Parental Violence
- On Psychopathic Inferiorities
- On Overcoming the Cultural Crisis
- Ludwig Rubiner's "Psychoanalysis"
- Psychoanalysis or Us Clinicians
- The Influence of the Collective on the Individual
- Notes For a New Ethics
- Note on Relationships
- The Case Otto Gross. Letter to Maximilian Harden
- On the Symbolism of Destruction
- Contribution to the Casuistics of Post-Typhoid Affectations of the System
- Notice; with Franz Jung
- On the Conflict between One's Own and That of the Other
- The Communist Idea in the Symbolism of Paradise
- The Orientation of Intellectuals
- Protest and Morality in the Unconscious
- On the Problem of Parliamentarism
- On the Functional Intellectual Education of the Revolutionary
- Three Papers on the Inner Conflict
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