Otto Gross: Biography Of This Austrian Psychoanalyst
Otto Gross was a psychiatrist who took her 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 an anarchist, which meant that he was excluded from the Freudian school, as well as another series of problems for him.
He had a series of addictions to various drugs, which led to him being admitted to several psychiatric hospitals. He also came to be treated by psychoanalyst Carl Jung, at Freud’s request.
In this biography of Otto Gross We will see a brief biography about this psychiatrist who raised all kinds of controversies for his way of thinking and his unconventional therapeutic methods.
Otto Hans Adolf Gross, better known as Otto Gross, was born on March 17, 1877 in Giebing, a city in Austria. Although there are authors who claim that he was born in a city in Ukraine called Chernovtsi because his family came from this country.
He had no siblings, and his father, Hans Gross, was the first prosecutor of that city where he lived with his family, who has been considered a pioneer in the field of modern criminology. A few years later the family moved to Graz, the second largest city in Austria, where Otto Gross’s father took over as director of the newly founded Institute of Criminalistics.
Otto Gross He received a strict upbringing from 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 Faculty of Medicine at the University of Vienna.
Medical studies in Vienna
During his years as a university student he was a rather shy, withdrawn and very unsociable student ; focused exclusively on his studies, so he hardly made any friends during his time at university.
After graduating in medicine, he began to work as a doctor in the merchant navy and, after a few years of work, 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 got along very well at first. Even Freud helped Gross to continue training in order to work as a teacher in the future, so that Gross managed to obtain a doctorate in psychopathology at the University of Graz. Freud being the supervisor of his doctoral thesis
In 1902 he made an attempt to systematize psychology by publishing a work titled “Secondary brain function,” a work to which Carl Jung dedicated a chapter of his work about his definition of psychological types 18 years later.
Stage as a patient of Carl Jung
Freud contacted Jung when they both had a friendly relationship, to ask him to treat Otto Gross psychologically because he had addiction problems to cocaine, opium and morphine, which he had begun to get hooked on when he was a doctor in the navy, which is why he was suffering serious problems.
Jung diagnosed Gross, in the first instance, with an obsessional neurosis and, later, after having conducted more therapy sessions with him, he diagnosed him with dementia praecox. Without completing the treatment with Jung, Gross escaped by jumping over the wall of the psychiatric hospital where he was admitted
Related to this, there is a film titled “A Dangerous Method,” which features fragments of Gross’s therapy sessions as Jung’s patient, as well as interactions between Freud and Jung.
Stay in Munich
Following Freud’s recommendation, in 1906, Gross moved to the city of Munich (Germany) to work with Kraepelin in his psychiatry clinic.
In the Munich city Gross came into contact with the anarchist bohemia, which in those years had its nerve center in Munich, in some very turbulent years that preceded the First World War.
On the opposite side was an alliance that was made up of the industrial, financial, agrarian oligarchy and the military establishment, characterized by forming a very compact block, forming the state structure of the Empire. These men exercised dictatorial power that, together with the continuously growing industrialization, marked the need to develop a diversification of knowledge and a series of skills that this entailed.
Likewise, the great constant growth in the number of inhabitants in 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 Newly emerged dissidence among young people who raised their voices through new ways of expressing themselves and with different ways of life These were the glory days for the members of German Bohemia.
Within this cultural and social framework, Freud’s theories about the relevance of the human being’s unconscious and sexuality had opened a world of possibilities to be able to therapeutically address people’s inner suffering and, being a recent discipline, gave rise to to various interpretations.
Among them was Gross, who used this Freudian theory as a central element to criticize the dominant culture so that according to this theory, the conflict that existed between one’s own and that of others, having been imposed by the family and the State, was the root of the internal conflict.
Gross criticized that the State in which he lived was responsible for 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 having a strict and authoritarian father.
The case of Sophie Benz
Sophie Benz was a patient of Otto Gross who had not been able to recover from a trauma as a result of having suffered a rape. After some time attending therapy with Gross, one day she committed suicide by poisoning, being Gross’s second patient to do so.
This tragic event led to Gross being accused of medical negligence, for which A search and arrest warrant was issued against this psychiatrist
Gross then ends up undergoing psychiatric treatment, returning to his country, although he does not finish said treatment and decides to flee to Switzerland. There he makes an attempt to set up a free education university. However, his project fails when 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.
Stage in Berlin
Otto Gross arrived in this city in 1913 and settled in Franz Jung’s house a bohemian writer with whom he would end up maintaining a close relationship that would last several years.
Together with Franz Jung he published a magazine titled “Die Aktion” that 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’s arrest and the beginning of the First World War.
Despite 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 Ludwig Rubiner”, “The effects of collectivity”. about the individual” and “Psychoanalysis or us physicians.” During those years he also published a work of his known as “On conflict and relationship.”
You may be interested: “Otto Rank: biography of this Viennese psychoanalyst”
Detention and psychiatric admission
Due to an arrest warrant from his father, Hans Gross, who is aware that his son resides in Berlin, Two men show up at the house of their friend Franz Jung, taking Otto Gross, 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 for which he needed to be admitted to be under medical supervision, the father achieved his goal of keeping his son under surveillance. and supervision. Thus, Gross is placed under guardianship due to insanity, being assigned to his father
Meanwhile, Franz Jung and other colleagues became involved in a campaign to free Otto Gross, publishing copies of the magazine “Die Aktion” where they focused on conflicts between parents and children explained in psychological terms, a discipline that had reached to consolidate at that time, being considered a generational conflict of modernity of the first order.
The pressure exerted by his friends against Otto Gross’s father ends up paying off, so The father ends up declaring that his son had entered the psychiatric clinic voluntarily So his friends go to pick up Gross.
However, his liberation would be short-lived due to the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, at which time Franz Jung volunteered for war. At the same time Otto Gross moved back to Austria to continue his treatment for his drug addictions and, some time later, He ends up also presenting himself as a war volunteer
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 Gross’s case it could be because volunteering offered him the possibility of becoming financially independent from his father. However, he and many others would eventually desert.
After having deserted
After having defected, Gross starts working in a hospital in the Carpathians Shortly after, in 1915, his father died and, despite this event, Otto Gross was unable to free himself from his ward status because his father had left everything tied up before he died, so his son had to go. destined for a military hospital where his condition worsens and he has to undergo a new detoxification treatment.
In 1917 he managed to have his guardianship removed due to insanity and He decides to move to Budapest and then to Prague, where he establishes a friendship with Franz Kafka, over whom he exerted a great influence, to the point that those who claim that his novel “The Trial” is based on the story of Otto Gross’s arrest. Likewise, Gross is also said to have served as an inspiration to more literary writers.
One year later He returns to Austria, where it is thought that he became involved in an attempted revolution in the country and, after failing, he decides to take refuge again in the house of his friend Franz Jung in Berlin. It was during this time that he published a series of political texts, all of them written with great logic and analytical clarity. However, Gross goes deeper and deeper and can’t find a way to get out with the help of anything or anyone, so he becomes heavily hooked on drugs again.
After a series of disagreements with Franz Jung, both end up breaking off their friendship and Gross ended up wandering the streets of Berlin, dying on February 13, 1920 due to pneumonia, being found on the street completely malnourished and with symptoms of frostbite. Hardly any obituaries were written in his name, despite having been a relevant person for an entire generation of artists, bohemians and writers.
The thought of Otto Gross
Otto Gross began to defend sexual liberation and anti-psychiatry, an approach within mental health that detracted from the conventional and prevailing psychiatry model of the time. This approach, among other aspects, criticized the medicalization of those problems whose causes were social in 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 approach that tried to address the psychological repression of his patients, so he used unconventional therapeutics, causing criticism from other psychiatrists who turned their backs on him.
As a supporter of free love, he had a large number of lovers and children with several of them.
