Otto Gross

Otto Gross (1877–1920) was an Austrian psychoanalyst. A maverick early disciple of Sigmund Freud, he later became an anarchist and joined the utopian Ascona community.

His father Hans Gross was a judge turned pioneering criminologist. Otto initially collaborated with him, and then turned against his determinist ideas on character.

A champion of an early form of anti-psychiatry and sexual liberation, he also developed an anarchist form of depth psychology (which rejected the civilising necessity of psychological repression proposed by Freud). He adopted a modified form of the proto-feminist and neo-pagan theories of Johann Jakob Bachofen, with which he attempted to return civilization back to a postulated 'golden age' of non-hierarchy. He was subsequently ostracized, and was not included in histories of the psychoanalytic and psychiatric establishments. He died in poverty.

Greatly influenced by the philosophy of Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche and the political theories of Peter Kropotkin, he in turn influenced D. H. Lawrence (through Gross' affair with Frieda von Richthofen), Franz Kafka and other artists, including the founders of Berlin Dada. His influence on psychology was more limited. Carl Jung claimed his entire worldview changed when he attempted to analyse Gross and partially had the tables turned on him.

As a Bohemian drug user from early youth, as well as an advocate of free love, he is sometimes credited as a founding grandfather of 20th Century Counterculture.

Contributions to Depth Psychology

In his 1913 work A Contribution to Psychological Types, Jung devoted a paragraph to Otto Gross' contributions.

The relation he [Gross] established between manic-depressive insanity and the type with a shallow consciousness shows that we are dealing with extraversion, while the relation between the psychology of the paranoiac and the type with a contracted consciousness indicates the identity with introversion (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 879).

In Jung's monumental work Psychological Types, all of chapter VI, The Type Problem in Psychopathology, analyzes and reconciles Gross' theory as expressed in Die zerebrale Sekundärfunktion (1902) and Über psychopathische Minderwertigkeit (1903).

Gross deserves full credit for being the first to set up a simple and consistent hypothesis to account for this [the extraverted] type (Jung, [1921] 1971: par. 466).

Notes