ABSTRACT
In the last few years the life and works of the Austrian doctor, psychoanalyst and anarchist Otto Gross have been the object of renewed interest. His central theme, the liberation of the individual from the social and political norms of bourgeois society at the turn of the century, today occupies those who are concerned with establishing how individuals can assert themselves in a world that is increasingly endangered by technocratic penetration and led by increasingly complex administrative and political decision-making processes. In fact, precisely those groups within the so-called alternative movements which seek to evade the external control of the individual by the bureaucratic apparatus and to escape from the optimism of our modern industrial societies by turning to communal forms of living and economic activity have rediscovered Otto Gross as one of their spiritual fathers, praising him as a 'prophet of alternative modes of life'. 1
Even his contemporaries - comrades from the circle of the literary and artistic avant-garde, political friends and professional colleagues - were likewise fascinated by the works and the man. Intellectual radicalism and personal charisma, as well as the consistency with which Otto Gross placed his own life at the service of his vision of a society free of authority and control, secured him many supporters, particularly from the circle of Munich bohemians and the anarchist community settlement on Monte Verita in Ascona. 2 He inspired many writers, who knew him, to draw literary portraits of him. 3 For Erich Miihsam, the anarchist poet and close friend, who in 1905 took Gross to Ascona for the first time, he was 'Sigmund Freud's most important pupil'. 4 Freud himself considered Gross one of the few original thinkers among his pupils, but did not predict a great career for him because of his dependence on drugs. 5 He reminded Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, who was personally introduced by Gross to psychoanalytical praxis before the First World War, of the romantic conception of genius. 6 And Max Weber, who made his acquaintance in 1906-7 in the house of Edgar and Else Jaffe, attributed an almost charismatic power to the young psychoanalyst. 7
I shall attempt below to reconstruct Max Weber's relations with Otto Gross in three stages. First, I shall examine the theoretical works by Gross in so far as they are relevant to Weber's arguments with him; then I shall turn to Weber's attitude to these theories and his part in the lives of their adherents; finally, I shall investigate Weber's interpretations of the relations between eroticism and the modern world.
