Dr. Otto Gross – The One
Truly Committed Psychoanalyst
A bit about OTTO
GROSS: Nietzschean Psychoanalyst, Love Guru, Pagan
Anarchist
Wikipedia article
Who was Otto Gross?
What made Dr. Otto Gross so dangerous a threat to the
establishment?
The BBC documentary series "The Century of the Self", to
be found on You Tube, proposes convincingly that Sigmund Freud, and more so his
daughter Anna, intended psychoanalysis to be a most power and indispensable
tool of population control and manipulation.
Society was held up as the unquestionable standard of normalcy and
any aberrant, rebellious or non-normative behavior demonstrated by any
individual was considered pathological on the part of the individual. That
pathology was to be corrected with psychoanalysis.
In contradistinction, Otto Gross wrote the following, which is excerpted from the small amount of his work that has been
translated. Evidently, the psychiatric community would rather keep him in
obscurity. You will see why presently.
"…I must assume that knowledge of the Freudian method and its
important results is already widespread. Since Freud we understand all that is
inappropriate and inadequate in our mental life to be the results of inner
experiences whose emotional content excited intense conflict in us. At the time
of those experiences – especially in early childhood – the conflict seemed
insoluble, and they were excluded from the continuity of the inner life as it
is known to the conscious ego. Since then they have continued to motivate us
from the unconscious in an uncontrollably destructive and oppositional way. I
believe that what is really decisive for the occurrence of repression is to be
found in the inner conflict…rather than in relation to the sexual impulse.
Sexuality is the universal motive for the infinite number if internal
conflicts, though not in itself but as the object of a sexual morality which
stands in insoluble conflict with everything that is of value and belongs to
willing and reality.
It appears that at the deepest level the real nature of these
conflicts may always be traced back to one comprehensive principle, to
the conflict between that which belongs to oneself and that which belongs to
the other, between that which is innately individual and that which has been
suggested to us, i.e., that which is educated or otherwise forced into us.
This conflict of individuality with an authority that has
penetrated into our own innermost self belongs more
to the period of childhood than to any other time.
The tragedy is correspondingly greater as a person's individuality
is more richly endowed, is stronger in its own particular nature. The earlier
and the more intensely that the capacity to withstand suggestion and
interference begins its protective function, the earlier and the more intensely
will the self-divisive conflict be deepened and exacerbated. The only natures
to be spared are those in whom the predisposition towards individuality is so
weakly developed and is so little capable of resistance that under the pressure
of suggestion from social surroundings, and the influence of education, it
succumbs, in a manner of speaking, to atrophy and disappears altogether -
natures whose guiding motives are at last composed entirely of alien,
handed-down standards of evaluation and habits of reaction,. In such second-rate
characters a certain apparent health can sustain itself, i.e., a peaceful and
harmonious functioning of the whole of the soul or, more accurately, of what
remains of the soul. On the other hand, each individual who stands in any way
higher than this normal contemporary state of things is not, in existing,
conditions, in a position to escape pathogenic conflict and to attain his individual
health i.e., the full harmonious development of the highest possibilities
of his innate individual character.
It is understood from all this that such characters hitherto, no
matter in what outward form they manifest themselves – whether they are opposed
to laws and morality, or lead us positively beyond the average, or collapse
internally and become ill – have been perceived with either disgust, veneration
or pity as disturbing exceptions whom people try to eliminate. It will come to
be understood that, already today, there exists the demand to approve these
people as the healthy, the warriors, the progressives, and to learn from and
through them.
Not one of the revolutions in recorded history has succeeded in
establishing freedom for individuality…Only now can it be recognized that the
root of all authority lies in the family, that the combination of sexuality
and authority, as it shows itself in the patriarchal family still prevailing
today, claps every individuality in chains…" – "Overcoming
Cultural Crisis", originally published in Die Aktion in
April 1913, translated by Dr. John Turner of the University of Wales, Swansea,
courtesy of Gottfried Heueer and the International
Otto Gross Society, reprinted in ANARCHISM – A Documentary
History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume One: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE to
1939), pp. 282-3, Robert Graham, editor, copyright 2005 Black Rose Books.
We can see from the passage above, in which he eerily presaged his
own "elimination", why Dr. Otto Gross was considered so very
dangerous by the psychoanalytic establishment.
Doreen Ellen Bell-Dotan, Tzfat, Israel