ABSTRACT

I am a psychoanalyst and from my experience I have gained the insight that the existing order of the family is a bad one. Authority in the family as the source of authority per se has to be changed –, the basic conict within the personality is the one between the inborn character and the will towards oneself; – we are all bound up in the suggestions, which we call education. I believe that there is an inborn ethics, which is in contact with an inborn sexuality that is dierent from the enforced one. The only one who has recognized this is the national economist Kaspar Schmidt [pseudonym of Max Stirner (1806-56)] [ . . . ]; and since I want everything changed, I am an anarchist. (Ibid.)

The psychiatrists went as far as listing, in their report, as both aspects and proofs of Gross’s pathology

[The] dominating inuence [ . . . ] along the lines of the well-known Stirnerian radicalism (total negation of state, religion and morals, emphasis on the crassest egotism) side by side with Nietzsche’s ideas (as complete a satisfaction of the instincts and fullment of the will to power as an ideal). (Ibid.: 34)

In addition, the psychiatrists paraphrased another of Gross’s statements, ‘Since “authority” thus arrests the most beautiful ower of humanity in its development, it had to disappear from the earth in each and every form; hence he was an anarchist’ (ibid.: 35). Somehow their report reached a Viennese newspaper where it was summarized:

He is an anarchist, too, in the most serious pathological sense. His father, the famous criminologist Doktor Hans Gross, has not shied away from any eorts nor sacrices to free his son from his illness, eorts that, alas, had to remain in vain in view of the serious character of the illness. (Anon., 1914: 6)

However, only two years after Gross’s death, conservative philosopher and political theorist Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), spoke of ‘all anarchist teachings, from Babeuf to Bakunin, Kropotkin and Otto Gross’ in his Political Theology (1922: 50). Cultural analyst Nicolaus Sombart comments ‘The evocation of [Gross’s] name – as the culmination point in the succession of the great anarchists [ . . . ] tears a hole into the back-drop of intellectual history which opens like a window onto the immediate problems of the present’(1991: 101).