Otto Gross: biography of this Austrian psychoanalyst

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

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

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

In this biography of Otto Gross We will see a brief biography about this psychiatrist who got to raise all kinds of controversies for his way of thinking and for his unconventional therapeutic methods.

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Brief biography of Otto Gross

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 in the city where he resided. together with his family, who has been considered a pioneer in the field of criminology modern. 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 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 A's. 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During his years as a university student, he was a very shy, withdrawn and very unsociable student.; focused exclusively on his studies, so he hardly made friends during his time in college.

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

Acquaintances of both commented that Freud and Gross hit it off very well at first. Even Freud helped Gross to continue his training in order to work as a teacher in the future, so that Gross managed to get a doctorate in psychopathology at the University of Graz, being Freud the supervisor of his doctoral thesis.

In 1902 he made an attempt to systematize psychology by publishing a work entitled "Brain function secondary school ”, work to which Carl Jung dedicated a chapter of his work on the definition of him on psychological types 18 years later.

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Carl Jung's Patient Stage

Freud came in contact with Jung when they were both in a friendly relationship, to ask him to treat Otto Gross psychologically. because it had problems with addiction to cocaine, opium and morphine, which he had started to get hooked on when he was a doctor in the navy, for which he was suffering serious problems.

Jung first diagnosed Gross with an obsessive neurosis and later, after more therapy sessions with him, diagnosed him with early dementia. Without actually completing the treatment with Jung, Gross escaped by jumping the wall of the mental hospital where he was interned.

A collation of this, there is a movie titled "A Dangerous Method", where they appear excerpts from Gross's therapy sessions as Jung's patient, as well as interactions between Freud and Jung.

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Stay in Munich

Following Freud's recommendation, in 1906, Gross moved to the city of Munich (Germany) to work with Kraepelin at his psychiatry clinic.

In the Munich city Gross came into contact with the anarchist bohemian, who in those years had in Munich its nerve center, in a very turbulent years that preceded the First War World.

On the opposite side there was an alliance that was 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 wielded a dictatorial power which, together with the continuously growing industrialization, marked the need to develop a diversification of knowledge and a series of skills that led to with him.

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

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

Among them was that of Gross, who she used this Freudian theory as a central element to make a critique of the dominant cultureThus, according to this theory, that 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 the cause of promulgating that a family model prevailed in which the father had to be authoritarian within his family, so he considered that they were responsible for the suffering personal. This could be related to the fact that he had a strict and authoritarian father.

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The case of Sophie Benz

Sophie Benz was an Otto Gross patient who had not been able to recover from trauma as a result of being raped. After some time going to therapy with Gross, one day he committed suicide by poisoning, being the second Gross patient to do so.

This tragic event led to Gross being charged with medical malpractice, so A search and arrest warrant was issued against this psychiatrist.

Then Gross 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 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.

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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 entitled "Die Aktion" that dealt with individual psychology, where they tried to expose the economic and cultural problems of the time. However, this project would end up failing later as a result of 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 Ludwing Rubiner "," The effects of the collectivity on the individual "and" Psychoanalysis or we the optional ”. During those years he also published a work of his known as "On conflict and relationship."

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Detention and psychiatric admission

By an arrest warrant for his father, Hans Gross, who is aware that his son resides in Berlin, Two men appear at the house of his 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 difficult to cure due to that 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 put under guardianship for insanity, being assigned to his father.

Meanwhile, Franz Jung and other colleagues got involved in a campaign to free Otto Gross, editing issues in the magazine "Die Aktion" where they focused on the conflicts between parents and children explained in a psychological key, a discipline that had become 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 ends up paying off, so the father ends by stating that his son had voluntarily entered the psychiatric clinic. So his friends go to pick up Gross.

However, his release would be short-lived by the outbreak of the First World War 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 his drug addiction and, 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 her the possibility of becoming financially independent from his father. However, he and many others would eventually defect.

After having deserted

After having defected, Gross he starts working in a hospital in the Carpathians. A short time later, 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 has to go to a military hospital where his condition worsens and he has to undergo a new treatment of detoxification.

In 1917 he managed to have his guardianship removed for insanity and He decides to move to Budapest and then to Prague, where he becomes friends with Franz Kafka, on which he comes to exert a great influence, to the point that those who assure that his novel "The Trial" is based on the story of the arrest of Otto Gross. Likewise, Gross is also said to have inspired more literary writers.

One year later he returns back to Austria, where it is thought that he got involved in an attempted revolution in the country and, after failing, he decides to return to take refuge in the house of his friend Franz Jung in Berlin. It is at this time that he published a series of texts of a political nature, all of them written with great logic and analytical clarity. However, Gross is sinking more and more and does not find a way to get out with the help of anything or anyone, so he becomes strongly hooked on drugs again.

After a series of disagreements with Franz Jung they both end up breaking their friendship and Gross ends up wandering the streets of Berlin, dying on February 13, 1920 from pneumonia., being found in the street completely malnourished and with symptoms of frostbite. There were hardly any obituaries written in his name, despite having been a relevant person for a whole generation of artists, bohemians and literary men.

The thought of Otto Gross

Otto Gross began to defend sexual liberation and antipsychiatry, an approach within mental health that detracted from the conventional and prevailing psychiatry model of the time. Said approach, among other aspects, criticized the medicalization of those problems whose causes were social nature, advocating the use of psychotherapy in order to address them more effectively and less invasive.

He also drove the development of an anarchist approach to deep psychology, rejecting the Freudian approach that he tried to address the psychological repression of his patients, thus he used unconventional therapy, causing criticism from other psychiatrists who came to give him the back.

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