Otto Gross: biography of this Austrian psychoanalyst

This was the life of the controversial psychoanalyst Otto Gross, influential in countercultural movements.

Otto Gross was a psychiatrist who took his first steps as a disciple of Sigmund Freud and contributed several theories to psychoanalysis.

Despite this, he had somewhat controversial ideas for that time, being considered as an anarchist, which meant that he was excluded from the Freudian school, as well as a series of other problems for him.

He had a series of addictions to various drugs, which caused him to be admitted to several psychiatric hospitals. He was also treated by the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, at Freud's request.

At this biography of Otto Gross we will see a brief biography of this psychiatrist who came to raise all kinds of controversy for his way of thinking and his unconventional therapeutic methods.

Short biography of Otto Gross

Otto Hans Adolf Gross, better known as Otto Gross, was born on March 17, 1877 in Giebing, a town in Austria.a town in Austria. Although there are authors who affirm that he was born in a city of Ukraine called Chernovtsi due to the fact that his family came from this country.

He had no siblings, and his father, Hans Gross, was the first prosecutor of that city where he resided with his family, who has been considered a pioneer in the field of modern criminology. A few years later the family moved to Graz, Austria's second largest city, where Otto Gross' father became the director of the newly founded Institute of Criminalistics.

Otto Gross received a strict upbringing by an authoritarian father who was obsessed with having his only son follow in his footsteps.. Due to the high demands of his father, he was always a very studious student, with outstanding grades. When he finished high school, he decided to continue his studies by entering the medical faculty of the University of Vienna.

Medical studies in Vienna

During his years as a university student, he was a rather shy, withdrawn and unsociable student, focused exclusively on his studies.He focused exclusively on his studies, so he made hardly any friends during his time at the university.

After graduating in medicine, he began working as a doctor in the merchant navy and, after a few years of work, he met Sigmund Freud, he met Sigmund Freud, who had just published his work on the analysis of dreams and had offered him the opportunity to work as his assistant.

Acquaintances of both commented that Freud and Gross hit it off very well at first. Freud even helped Gross to continue his training for future teaching work, so that Gross was able to obtain a doctorate in psychopathology at the University of Graz, Freud was the supervisor of his doctoral thesis..

In 1902 he made an attempt to systematize psychology by publishing a work entitled "The Secondary Brain Function", a work to which Carl Jung dedicated a chapter of his work on his definition of psychological types 18 years later.

Stage as a patient of Carl Jung

Freud came to contact Jung when the two had a friendly relationship, to ask him to psychologically treat Otto Gross because he had problems of addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, to which he had begun to get hooked when he was a doctor in the navy, so he was suffering serious problems.

Jung first diagnosed Gross with obsessional neurosis and later, after further therapy sessions with him, diagnosed him with dementia praecox. Without ever completing Jung's treatment, Gross escaped by jumping over the wall of the psychoanalytic hospital, Gross escaped by jumping over the wall of the psychiatric hospital where he was incarcerated..

In this regard, there is a film entitled "A Dangerous Method", where fragments of Gross' therapy sessions as a patient of Jung appear, as well as interactions between Freud and Jung.

Stay in Munich

Following Freud's recommendation, in 1906, Gross moved to Munich (Germany) to work with Kraepelin in 1906. to work with Kraepelin in his psychiatric clinic.

In the Munich city Gross came into contact with the anarchist Bohemian movement, which in those years had its nerve center in Munich, in the very turbulent years that preceded World War I. On the opposing side was an alliance made up of the industrial, financial and agrarian oligarchy and the military establishment, characterized by forming a very compact bloc, forming the state structure of the Empire.

On the opposing side was an alliance made up of the industrial, financial and agrarian oligarchy and the military establishment, characterized by forming a very compact bloc, forming the state structure of the Empire. These men exercised a dictatorial power that, together with the continuously growing industrialization, marked the need for the development of a diversification of knowledge and a series of skills that this entailed.

Likewise, the constant growth in the number of inhabitants in the cities led to an increase in complexity and diversity at the social level, which led to the breakdown of the previously established social and political structure, so that dissidences emerged among the newly emerged young people who raised their voice through new ways of expressing themselves and with different ways of life. These were the times of glory for the members of the German bohemians.

Within this cultural and social framework, Freud's theories about the relevance of the human unconscious and sexuality had opened a world of possibilities to therapeutically address the inner suffering of people and, being a recent discipline, gave rise to various interpretations.

Among them was that of Gross, who used this Freudian theory as a central element to make a critique of the dominant culture.According to this theory, the conflict between the self and the other, having been imposed by the family and the State, was the root of the inner conflict.

Gross criticized that the state in which he lived was the cause of promulgating a family model in which the father had to be authoritarian within his family, for which he considered that they were responsible for personal suffering. This could be related to the fact of having had a strict and authoritarian father.

• You might be interested in, "What is Social Psychology?"

The case of Sophie Benz

Sophie Benz was a patient of Otto Gross who had not been able to recover from a trauma following a rape. After some time in therapy with Gross, one day she committed suicide by poisoning, the second of Gross' patients to do so.

This tragic event led to Gross being charged with medical malpractice, and a search and seizure warrant was issued for her. a search and arrest warrant was issued for the psychiatrist..

Then Gross ends up undergoing psychiatric treatment returning to his country, although he does not finish the treatment and decides to flee to Switzerland. There he attempts to set up a free teaching university. However, his project fails because he is accused of having been involved in a series of smuggling activities in the country, so he ends up fleeing to Munich and then to Berlin.

• Related article, "What is trauma and how does it influence our lives?"

Berlin stage

Otto Gross arrives in this city in 1913 and settles in the house of Franz Jung, a bohemian writer with whom he lives.a bohemian writer with whom he would end up maintaining a close relationship that would last for several years.

Together with Franz Jung he published a magazine entitled "Die Aktion" which dealt with individual psychology, where they tried to expose the economic and cultural problems of the time. However, this project would later fail due to Gross' arrest and the outbreak of the First World War.

In spite of this, he managed to publish a large block of works, among which the following stand out: "Observations on a New Ethics", "How to Overcome the Cultural Crisis", "The Psychoanalysis of Ludwing Rubiner", "The Effects of Collectivity on the Individual" and "Psychoanalysis or We the Practitioners". During those years he also published a work of his known as "On Conflict and Relationship".

Arrest and psychiatric admission

On an arrest warrant from his father, Hans Gross, who is aware that his son is living in Berlin, two men show up at the home of his father, Hans Gross, two men show up at the home of his friend Franz Jung, taking Otto Gross with them, to transfer him to a psychiatric hospital in Austria..

With the help of a medical report, written by Carl Jung, in which he certified that he suffered from a serious mental illness that was difficult to cure and for which he needed to be admitted for medical supervision, the father achieved his goal of keeping his son under surveillance and supervision. As a result, Gross is placed under the guardianship of insanity, which is assigned to his father..

In the meantime, Franz Jung and other colleagues became involved in a campaign to free Otto Gross, publishing issues in the journal "Die Aktion" where they focused on the conflicts between parents and children explained in psychological terms, a discipline that had come to be consolidated at that time, being considered as a generational conflict of modernity of the first order.

The pressure exerted by his friends against Otto Gross's father eventually paid off, so that the father ends up stating that his son had voluntarily entered the psychiatric clinic. So his friends go to collect Gross.

However, his release would be short-lived due to the outbreak of World War I in 1914, at which time Franz Jung volunteered for the war. At the same time, Otto Gross moved back to Austria to continue his treatment for drug addiction and, some time later, he ended up volunteering as a war volunteer, he also volunteered for the war effort..

It is curious that two people like Fraz Jung and Otto Gross, both declared enemies of the state of their country, came to present themselves as war volunteers. In the case of Gross it could be because volunteering offered him the possibility of becoming financially independent from his father. However, he and many others would eventually defect.

After deserting

After deserting, Gross starts working in a hospital in the Carpathian Mountains.. Shortly after, in 1915, his father died and, despite this event, Otto Gross does not manage to free himself from his condition of guardianship because his father had left everything tied up before he died, so his son has to go to a military hospital where his condition worsens and he has to undergo a new detoxification treatment.

In 1917 he manages to get his guardianship removed for insanity and decides to move to Budapest. decides to move to Budapest and later to Prague, where he becomes friends with Franz KafkaHe became a great influence on him, to the point that some say that his novel "The Trial" is based on the story of the arrest of Otto Gross. Gross is also said to have been an inspiration to other literary writers.

One year later returns to Austria, where he is thought to have been involved in an attempt at revolution in the country, and, having failed, decides to return to his friend Franz Jung in Berlin. and, after its failure, he decided to return to take refuge with his friend Franz Jung in Berlin. It was at this time that he published a series of political texts, all written with great logic and analytical clarity. However, Gross was sinking deeper and deeper and could not find a way out with the help of anyone or anything, so he became heavily hooked on drugs again.

After a series of disagreements with Franz Jung, the two end up breaking off their friendship and Gross ends up wandering around the streets of the city. Gross ends up wandering the streets of Berlin, dying on February 13, 1920 of pneumonia, being found in the street completely malnourished.He was found in the street completely malnourished and with symptoms of frostbite. Hardly any obituaries were written in his name, despite the fact that he was a relevant person for a whole generation of artists, bohemians and literary figures.

The thought of Otto Gross

Otto Gross began to advocate sexual liberation and anti-psychiatry, an approach to mental health detrimental to the conventional and prevailing model of psychiatry of the time.an approach within mental health that detracted from the conventional and prevailing model of psychiatry of the time. This approach, among other aspects, criticized the medicalization of those problems whose causes were of a social nature, advocating the use of psychotherapy in order to address them in a more effective and less invasive way.

He also promoted the development of an anarchist approach to depth psychology, rejecting the Freudian approachrejecting the Freudian approach that tried to address the psychological repression of his patients, so he used unconventional therapeutic, causing criticism from other psychiatrists who came to turn their backs on him.

As a supporter of free love, he came to have a large number of lovers and children with several of them.