ABSTRACT
More than others, one man embodied this radical upheaval in his life and work: Otto Gross, physician, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst and anarchist revolutionary. Although a catalyst at the centre of this cultural revolution, today he has almost become an unknown. This is the result of an analytic historiography provocatively called ‘Stalinist’ (Fromm, 1989: 195): in the history of analysis, just as in Stalinist historiography, labels like ‘schizophrenic’ or ‘psychotic’ have been attached to so many of the most brilliant thinkers – Adler, Jung, Ferenczi, Rank, Reich, to name but a few – that such ‘diagnoses’ can almost be regarded as orders of merit: expressions of the analytic revolution devouring its children. Gross was among the first of these. A dissident, he was made a non-person and almost completely vanished from the record. Today, most analysts have never heard of him, and if they have, their knowledge is usually confined to that condemning label: ‘Isn’t that the one who became schizophrenic?’ And yet, psychoanalyst/philosopher Pierre Bayard states,
it is not true that the dead are dead. In [ . . . ] reality, they possess a singular form of existence and continue to mingle with the living, shaping their decisions, dictating their statements and even their thoughts, imperiously demanding, with as much force and steadfastness as the living, finally to be recognized and heard. (2008: 188)
Apart from Gross resurfacing here and there in the memoirs of friends – and enemies – for some fifty years after his death, what almost amounts to a ‘conspiracy of silence’ has held tight. Only in the last forty years have scholars become interested in his life and work. Yet most of these have focused more on Gross’s ‘scandalous’ bohemian lifestyle or his general cultural influence. An in-depth engagement with what I see as Gross’s primary contributions, psychoanalysis and politics, and the impact of his ideas on the development of both analytical and political theory and practice, reverberating to the present – and to a postpostmodern future – has so far been lacking. The present study aims to fill this gap by focusing on Gross the psychoanalyst and revolutionary, to thus facilitate the return of the repressed in these areas.
