Sexual Revolutions: Gottfried Heuer (2011)

Newsletter, 2011

Sexual Revolutions:

Psychoanalysis, History and the Father

Edited by Gottfried Heuer

Routledge, 2011, London and New York: 291 pp.

History seems to repeat itself. Reading Sexual Revolutions, one is often surprised to see that many of today’s ideas had been considered, disputed over, and practiced about one hundred years ago. The early 20^th century was a time of turmoil and experimentation, utopian dreams, and revolutionary proposals. In this drama and in this volume, a minor character in the history of psychoanalysis, Otto Gross, plays a significant role.

Gross was the son of a famous father. Hans Gross was the father of criminology in late 19^th century Europe. His ground-breaking handbooks described the latest methods in crime detection.

However for all the efforts Gross Sr. put into stamping out crime, including deporting criminals to penal colonies, his only child Otto was an unruly character living in troubled times (1877-1920). He found his way to Freud and the then revolutionary field of psychoanalysis. He would practice his brand of psychoanalysis in Münich’s Café Stefanie. In time his father would abduct him from Germany, institutionalize him, have him declared insane, and upon his release, become his guardian. The case became a cause célèbre for the radical element who objected to the father’s patriarchal authority. Otto Gross would die in the streets of Munich in 1920 at 43, half-starved and nearly frozen to death. His father had died a few years earlier, a bitter man.

David Cronenberg’s film “A Dangerous Method” shows Gross arriving at the Burghölzli to “cure” his drug addiction (to morphine and cocaine). In conversation with Jung, Gross chides his father for disapproving of the three children that three different women bore him in the same year; in this way, as agent provocateur, he challenged Jung not to repress anything! The book’s editor, Gottfried Heuer, however, alleges that their engagement was a mutual analysis.

Libertine attitudes ran counter to prevailing convention. Sabina Spielrein’s mother made sure her daughter’s education should exclude any sexual matters. In an era of “civilized sexual morality” (p. 110) men seemed to be living guilt-free sex lives, while women were arriving at clinics with varied symptoms of sexual repression.

At that time many were fighting for “radical social change.” Gross’s most famous charge, made in the year that Freud and Jung finally and bitterly ended their collaboration, was that “the coming revolution is the revolution for matriarchy:” “old values would be replaced by relatedness, feeling, subjectivity, tolerance of not knowing – in the widest sense a sexual revolution.” (p. 2) The emancipation of women from “authoritarian structures” would establish a “New Humanity” (p. 117). Gross would join the revolutionaries to explore the “cultural implications of psychoanalysis.” (p. 114)

Gross claimed that: “My whole life was focused on overthrowing authorities” (p. 82) In this struggle he briefly made common cause with Franz Kafka, who was also distressed with his father. In 1917, they planned to publish a journal, Papers Against the Will to Power. Although their efforts came to naught. Kafka would continue to deal with authority in his own literary style.

Among Gross’s many lovers was Frieda Weekley, a German aristocrat, whom he called the “woman of the future.” She would later leave her English husband and children to “make history” with D. H. Lawrence. Their social disgrace led them into exile in America (New Mexico.)

Lawrence’s view of man was instinctive – “the spontaneous biological animal” (p. 178) – while Gross’s was more idealistic and even missionary. There was a touch of Nietzsche and his ubermensch in his efforts, according to Lawrence scholar John Turner.

The Swiss Alpine town of Ascona played a significant role in the development of early 20^th century Utopian movements. Gross visited there, as did many bohemians and avant-garde players. German expressionism was thriving and the Dada movement, among others, was fostered in this place. Ascona was established by Olga Fröbe-Kapteyn in 1899 and became the New Age centre of its time, a “free space for the spirit.” Later it became the site of the Eranos Lectures, which ran from 1933-1988. Another cycle ran from 1990-2006. Jung was a frequent guest along with many cutting-edge speakers.

Gross’s advocacy for sexual freedom was not an original moment. In the mid-1800’s John H. Noyes had established a community in Oneida, New York that was an economically successful experiment in communal living, with shared property and indeed shared partners. Their philosophy offered an alternative to bourgeois values. Later models like Friedrichshof in Germany – “the world’s most famous sex commune” – would follow that example, as did the liberation movements of the 1960’s and their philosophers, Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown.

A generation after Gross, Wilhelm Reich would shift Freud’s mental constructs into a much more physical dimension. He was dismissed by some as a quack, acclaimed by others as the father of bodywork. His notion of “orgiastic potential” came from a sense that society at large had repressed the physical expression of the individual from an early age. It was the task of therapy to release libido. In so doing he believed society would be liberated.

Andrew Samuels addresses the dominant cultural assumption of monogamy and challenges the therapeutic community for normalizing the relational aspect of long-term conventional fidelity while denying promiscuity’s “secret spiritual and social passage to the fullest possible healing engagement with a suffering world. (p. 233)

Amanda Han regards virginity, at least psychological virginity, as “as an undeniable inner authority, an integrity, a being complete within itself… Virginity is about renewal; of energy, of pace, of view, of possibilities; of sense of self … it opens up the world and bestows psychological and physical well-being.” (p. 246)

Finally Birgit Heuer examines a letter that a repentant Gross wrote to his wife, Frieda, late in his life:

“Frieda … Only the awareness of my own irredeemable guilt (towards you) and the experience of complete powerlessness in this regard, has led me now to look at myself (and my effect on others).” (p. 252)

Heuer also refers to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, where restorative justice has become the collective equivalent of personal forgiveness.

Gottfried Heuer points out the importance that relationship played in Gross’s philosophy. In 1919 he wrote “human nature … is striving toward the two great values: freedom and relationship. (p. 263) He regarded “relationship as third, as religion.”

Notwithstanding his idiosyncratic interpretation of Freudian psychoanalysis – acting out one’s erotic urges – other aspects of Otto Gross’s philosophy were also challenging, none more so that his insistence that politics be the main focus of psychoanalysis. “The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution.” At the turn of the 21^st century, the Jungian enterprise stretches from Europe to Australia, Russia, Mexico and South Africa.

Yet, like Sabina Spielrein, Otto Gross’s name seems to have been deleted from the origin story of psychoanalysis.

The essays in this stimulating volume remind us of the radical mood of the early 20^th century. They bring a haunting echo to our own times, with its news of the uprisings of the Arab Spring, financial chaos in Europe, and even the casseroling presence of young students and leftist organizations parading through Montreal streets adorned with “red squares.” Are we witnessing yet another revolution?

–Murray Shugar