OTTO GROSS: PSYCHOANALYSIS, REVOLUTION, AND GERMAN DADAISM
par Catherine Dufour
28 avril 2019
The life of Otto Gross, tinged with a hint of scandal, has earned him a significant literary fortune 1, as evidenced in 2018 by Marie-Laure de Cazotte's novel, Mon nom est Otto Gross 2, a few years after Cronenberg's film, A Dangerous Method (2011).
More seriously, it is as a "central figure of modernity" that Jacques Le Rider analyzed his career in a chapter of Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité 3, and prefaced his texts under the title Psychanalyse et Révolution 4.
After an overview of Gross's youth and his psychoanalytic dissidence, I will consider his influence on Raoul Hausmann between 1915 and 1918, and his evolution during the German Revolution. In doing so, I will show that his texts prefigure the ideas of Freudo-Marxism and the youth movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Youth, Education, Psychoanalytic Dissidence
Bohemia and Sexual Immoralism
Born into a very bourgeois Austrian family in 1877, Gross obtained his medical doctorate at the age of 22 and set off for South America, where he began to indulge in drugs. Upon his return, he turned to neurology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis.
Settling in Munich from 1906, he practiced in a psychiatric clinic until 1913. He frequented the intellectual bohemia—expressionist writers, anarchists, and philosophers steeped in Nietzscheanism—and often stayed in the alternative community of Monte Verità 5, near Ascona. Against a backdrop of subversive psychoanalysis and feminist utopias inspired by matriarchal mythologies, he practiced provocative polygamy and was involved in various scandals. He was known to the police and often wanted, as in 1911 in the canton of Zurich, until his father intervened.
Hans Gross and Otto Gross, Father and Son
Speaking of his father, he was a very famous criminal jurist of the Habsburg Monarchy, a rigid personality, a scourge of immorality, author in 1905 of a work entitled Dégénérescence et déportation (1905), which advocated the deportation of "degenerates" (homosexuals, vagabonds, anarchists, Gypsies) to distant colonies. After long protecting a son from whom he expected much but who had crossed the boundaries of deviance, he had him arrested in November 1913 in Berlin, committed to an institution in Austria, and placed under guardianship. But as early as December 1913, at the initiative of the writer Franz Jung, a vast defense campaign of the son against the father began 6, involving eminent intellectuals of the time, including Apollinaire and Cendrars—who perhaps took the fantastical Otto Gross as the model for Moravagine (1926). Gross was transferred to an asylum in Silesia in January 1914 and released in July for treatment in a sanatorium. Thereafter, he would alternately practice or be hospitalized in European hospitals and stay in Vienna, Munich, Prague, and Budapest until his death in Berlin in 1920.
Jacques Le Rider and Elisabeth Roudinesco have noted cultural analogies between the paranoia of President Schreber 8, Freud's famous case, and Gross's rebellion, both resulting from a repressive paternal education due to fear of sexual impulses. Among dominated sons, it should be noted that Gross was in contact in Prague with Franz Kafka, who drew inspiration from his story to write the first chapter of The Trial, the arrest of Joseph K 9.
As early as 1908, Gross had more broadly raised the issue of the repression of youth by the bourgeois family in the article "Parental Violence" 10, which analyzed the neurosis of one of his young patients as a direct consequence of family oppression, thus foreshadowing a cornerstone of Reichian ideology, developed in The Sexual Revolution 1930.
Psychoanalytic Dissidence
But what exactly was Gross's psychoanalysis? His early writings (1902-1907) reconciled Freud's theories with more organicist approaches. Drawing on Nietzsche's idea of the will to power, Gross early on believed in a biological adaptability of affects to situations of imbalance and gradually came to think that the main cause of neuroses was not sexual complexes as such, but difficulties in adapting to social constraints 11. This point opposed him to Freud and anticipated the debates of Freudo-Marxism on the possibility of psychoanalysis accounting for the antagonism between the individual and society.
Gross occupied a significant place in the relations between Freud and Jung, who considered him one of the brightest minds of his time. But as early as 1907, Jung expressed in a letter to Freud his concern about Gross's "sexual immoralism," judged by the latter as a sign of good mental health, while he himself considered "sexual repression" as an "indispensable cultural factor" 12. It was for the same reason that Max Weber condemned Gross 13, whose character is featured in numerous novels by Leonhard Frank, Franz Werfel, Max Brod, etc., oscillating between fascination for the liberator of morals and severity for the perverse psychoanalyst—strongly challenged in Max Brod's The Great Challenge (1918).
Admitted to the Burghölzli clinic in 1908 for a second detoxification treatment, Gross began a psychoanalysis with Carl Gustav Jung—which is partly the subject of Cronenberg's film. But the treatment was short-lived, as the patient fled, and Jung diagnosed "dementia praecox." Excessively invested in this psychoanalysis, Jung would write to Freud that he had been somehow psychoanalyzed by this fascinating man, whose ideas of sexual liberation had strongly influenced his relationship with his patient and mistress Sabina Spielrein 14.
Berlin 1913-1914: Affirmation of Thought
Premises of Freudo-Marxism
But this sexual immoralism can be considered from another angle. At the time of Gross's death, found on a Berlin sidewalk in 1920, cold and sick, the work of the Freudian left was beginning and undoubtedly unconsciously inherited from Gross's subversive psychoanalysis, while he himself was quickly forgotten due to the absence of "psychoanalysts to claim him," as Russell Jacoby wrote 15. A 1920 conference by Otto Fenichel, "Sexual Problems in Youth Movements" 16, well reflects the era in which Gross evolved. Jacoby painted a picture of this German youth who, confronted between 1915 and 1920 with war and revolution, in revolt against authoritarian fathers, began to demand free sexuality, in the continuity of Wedekind and his Spring Awakening (1891), dedicated to repressed juvenile sexuality. The 1920s also saw the rapprochement made by Reich between Marxism and psychoanalysis (which would give Dialectical Materialism and Psychoanalysis, 1929) and his divergences with Freud for having questioned the exclusively intrapsychic origin of neuroses, following his observations in the Viennese proletariat 17.
Publications and Affirmation of Thought
A text by Gross, published in 1913, a pivotal year in his life and thought (settling in Berlin, arrest), titled "How to Overcome the Crisis of Civilization?", appeared in the expressionist journal Die Aktion. It vividly prefigures, right from the start, the program of the Freudian left:
The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of revolution, meaning it is destined to become the catalyst for revolt within the psyche and the liberation of individuality, which is hindered by its own unconscious. It is meant to make one internally capable of freedom and to serve as a prelude to revolution 18.
In this article, as in most of his texts, Gross simultaneously invokes Nietzsche and Freud. He remained always faithful to the major Freudian concepts: unconscious psychic conflict, repression, catharsis, abreaction, etc. However, he also positioned himself at the opposite end with the key idea of his conceptual framework, continually refined until his death: the conflict between "das Eigene" and "das Fremde" ("the own" and "the foreign"). "Das Eigene" refers to all the innate good aspirations of the child (with a very Rousseauian emphasis!), while "das Fremde" represents the repressive external forces 19. Whereas Freud theorized the existence of intrapsychic conflicts formed in childhood, whose unresolved nature undermines adult life unconsciously, Gross held the opposite view: internal conflicts are not the cause of neurosis but the RESULT of external oppression from family, education, and sexual morality. If these conflicts need to be brought to light, it is to legitimize them and extract their revolutionary power. The sexual factor is not determining in the origin of these conflicts: sexuality is merely the privileged terrain on which they play out, in multiple configurations, which Gross would continue to explore.
In this struggle against repressive forces, the weak are those who adapt or submit, while strong personalities are the rebels, the marginalized, the "unbalanced." The concept of the "will to power" is perfectly appropriate here. It is understandable why, in 1909, in the last chapter of his work On Psychopathological Inferiorities, which countered his father's views on degeneration, Gross could write: "The degenerate are the salt of the earth!" 20.
The revolution must therefore be made against all forms of authority that suppress sexuality, found the patriarchy, and enslave the individual. And if none of the previous revolutions have succeeded, it is because "the revolutionary of yesterday carried authority within himself" 21, as he had not become conscious of it (through psychoanalysis). Today's revolutionary must fight "against rape," "against the father and against patriarchal law." But also against marriage, an institution of peasantry that enslaves women. The final paragraph proclaims: "The next revolution will be that of matriarchal law."
It is clear that such theories lead to a different practice of the cure. Had not Jung written to Freud in 1907 that Gross rid himself of transference by inviting his patients to live out their sexual immoralism, and that he considered transference as a symptom of monogamy 22?
The article published in Die Aktion lays the foundations for a cultural revolution. It emphasizes authoritarianism and its internalization by the individual, a question that would challenge the Freudian left, notably Reich in The Mass Psychology of Fascism (1933). It is known that the Frankfurt School devoted numerous studies to family authority (Fromm, Horkheimer) and the authoritarian personality (Adorno), whose influence would be dominant in youth movements like May 68.
In "The Effects of the Collective on the Individual" 23, an article from the same year 1913, which explicitly designates Freud as the continuator of Nietzsche on the question of "the pathogenic effect of repressed affects," Gross, a precursor to gender studies, adds that the internal conflict is determined by social representations that alienate women above all. Their hysteria or masochism are caused by the dominant representations of culture, in disagreement with their deep desires. As for men, they struggle with internal conflicts provoked by socially induced aggressive drives. The article titled "On a New Ethics" 24 takes a step further by stating the fundamental bisexuality of the individual. Homosexuality can be lived happily when it is not perverted by neurotic ramifications of internal conflict.
"The Symbolism of Destruction" 25, published in 1914 at the onset of the great work of European Destruction, adds to the Freudian corpus the theories of Alfred Adler, Wilhelm Stekel, and I. Marcinowski on the role of religious and social values in the development of the individual, and especially those of Sabina Spielrein, who introduced the innovative idea of a primary destructive drive (Destruction as the Source of Becoming, 1912). Gross deduces from his observations of patients that the sexual relationship is experienced as rape by women, to which they oppose an "ethical" refusal. The conflict between "das Eigene" and "das Fremde" often attaches itself to an unconscious representation of sexuality as destruction and rape, and of birth as injury. The individual is often grappling with an internal sadomasochism that leads to destructive relationships with others. Corollarily, these drives are associated with a social representation of the masculine as superiority (Adler). The domination of women has been the greatest trauma in the history of humanity, confirmed by the discoveries of anthropology (Caspar Schmidt). The matriarchy of the golden age allowed women to ensure maternity without the destructive counterpart that the patriarchy had imposed: the recognition of children by men who, in exchange, had the right to rape and ownership over them. In the communist matriarchy, the community would ensure the economic protection of women, now sexually free, and facilitate their sacred care of children.
Gross had been influenced, since his time in Munich, by a work that had a immense impact, Mother Right (1861) by Johann Jakob Bachofen—commented on by Engels in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (1884) — which claimed that an "Edenic matriarchy" had been overthrown in very ancient times by a violent patriarchy.
Gross, Hausmann, and Dada: 1915-1918
Gross and Hausmann: Common Influences
It is now appropriate to focus on the years 1915-1918, those of the meeting in Berlin of Gross with Hausmann and Berlin Dada, through the intermediary of Franz Jung. Hausmann and Gross, who probably never met, evolved on the same intellectual ground. Starting with the anarchism that had developed before the war in bohemian circles, and whose characteristic in Germany, at the time of Hausmann, was its individualist orientation 26. Gross's encounter with Eric Mühsam in 1905 had sealed a historic link between psychoanalysis and anarchism 27.
Gross and Hausmann both privileged the question of the individual, the self, this obsession with the modern crisis extensively developed by Jacques Le Rider in his study on Viennese modernity 28. Among their reference philosophers were Nietzsche and Stirner. The conflict between "das Eigene und das Fremde," theorized by Gross, irresistibly evokes The Ego and Its Own (Der Einzige und sein Eigentum, 1844) by the anarchist Max Stirner, an advocate of radical individualism. Hausmann would participate in 1919 in the journal Der Einzige (The Unique), inspired by Stirner. Hubert van den Berg remarks that Stirnerian individualist anarchism could rightly be considered a major model for Dada 29, which seems to be confirmed in 1919 by the last sentence, in capital letters, of the "Pamphlet Against the Weimar Point of View" 30... published precisely in Der Einzige:
DADA IS FOR EACH ONE'S OWN LIFE!!!
Nietzsche was also a common essential source, who oriented Hausmann towards introspection 31, the obsession of his youth in search of Dionysianism, irrationality, primitivism, emotions, against social rationality. In Gross, Nietzsche, as we have seen, took the form of a belief in a sovereign vital force.
The Psychoanalytic Origins of Dada in Berlin
It is psychoanalysis that, in Berlin, links Gross and Hausmann. In Dada Correspondence 32 in 1958, Hausmann reproached Georges Hugnet (The Dada Adventure, 1957) for having considered Berlin Dada exclusively as a vector of communist propaganda, without understanding its psychoanalytic dimension. This point is essential: often, Berlin Dada is differentiated from other Dada movements, such as those in Zurich, Cologne, Hanover, or Paris, by its political connotation linked to the particular context of the years 1918-1920 in Germany. However, what makes it greatly different is that there was also a psychoanalytic concern in Berlin, which existed very little in Zurich, with a few exceptions, such as the parodic staging of the quarrel between Freud and Jung by Sophie Taueber in The Stag King. Interest in psychoanalysis was weak in the Dada movement as a whole, as shown by Anne-Élisabeth Halpern in "Jung, Gross, and Jung: Three Unconscious for a Dada" 33. Had not Tzara himself declared in his Dada Manifesto 1918 that psychoanalysis was a "dangerous disease," which "lulled the anti-real tendencies of man and systematized the bourgeoisie" 34?
Hausmann explains in Dada Correspondence that the reception of Gross's psychoanalysis had been facilitated by an old interest in German culture for the unconscious, among writers and theorists of psychology systematically reviewed. It is not surprising, he concludes, that a circle formed around Franz Jung, Gross, and a psychoanalysis that preceded Freud and Carl Gustav Jung 35. But which also preceded, he added, Paris Dada (Surrealism), influenced by German romantics and the Freudian unconscious, which was true for Breton or in Tzara's Grains and Issues. He was grateful to Otto Gross for having "revealed the conflict of the ego and the you, of the self and the other; of the foreign," while he himself condemned the "masculine-Protestant attitude" in the name of "the Amazonian protest of women against the hero or Clytemnestra complex" 36; in other words, he condemned the masculine in favor of the matriarchy.
Role Played by Die Freie Strasse (The Free Street)
Gross's ideas were disseminated in a small journal, Die Freie Strasse (1915-1918), initially expressionist but later becoming Dadaist, conceived by Franz Jung, a revolutionary activist who called in the early issues for the "destruction of society by any appropriate means" 37. This journal had 10 issues from 1915 to 1918, which claimed, based on the "new destructive psychology," to "inaugurate a new technique of life and happiness" 38:
The texts in our journal were written with the aim of liberating our own unconscious energies, drawing from their source, and encouraging unknowns in the public 39.
The close intertwining of the radical left, Gross's psychoanalysis, and the birth of Dada—George Grosz, John Heartfield, and Richard Huelsenbeck joined the journal in 1917—is evident there: Gross's theories (represented notably by the publication of the text "Vom Konflikt des Eigenen und Fremden" 40 in issue 4 of 1916) or those of Franz Jung ("On the Necessity of Contradiction" in issue 6 of 1917) are developed throughout the articles. The engravings of Georg Schrimpf, featuring soft feminine characters, would embody, according to Patrick Lhot, the happiness of the matriarchy, an essential aspiration of the journal 41. As for issue 7/8, Club Dada, directed by Huelsenbeck, it is entirely devoted to Dada, and from this moment, the journal becomes a programmatic organ, remarkable for its layout and typography. But in issue 9 of 1918 ("Against Property"), there is still an article by Hausmann imbued with the initial spirit of Die Freie Strasse: its title, "Menschen leben erleben" ("People live experience"), contains the key notion ("erleben": to experience) of a journal in search of existential authenticity and conformity with the deep desires of the individual. Hausmann would even have made this notion, according to Hubert van den Berg, "the quintessence of Dada" 42.
Gross's psychoanalysis had thus been deliberately put at the service of Dada's subversive work. Huelsenbeck, returning from Zurich where he had co-founded the Cabaret Voltaire, had the brilliant idea of attaching the word Dada to a specifically Berlin "proto-Dada" activity (the term is Hausmann's 43) 44. Die Freie Strasse had propagated a state of mind that made it "capable of instantly understanding the importance of the Dada Movement of Zurich" 45.
The subversive performances led by Hausmann and Johannes Baader engaged Gross's ideas "on a broader scale, by unsettling German militarism," through an experience of the self, at the heart of political reality:
We strove to put our convictions into practice, disdaining all vain theory, always paying for our discoveries with the stake of our integral person. We let ourselves go into mental excesses in an atmosphere of sought-after adventure.
Does this statement not have a taste of situationism before its time? Particular affinities would later develop between Guy Debord and Raoul Hausmann 46...
Transposition of Gross's Psychoanalysis into the Aesthetic and Performative Domain
If we are to believe P. Lhot, Gross's theory of psychic conflict would have been transposed into the aesthetic domain, crossing another notion, the "creative indifference" of the philosopher Salomo Friedländer 47, the "point of absolute indifference" 48 and extreme energy which, by canceling out opposing polarities, was a lever for creation. One naturally thinks of Tzara and his Dada Manifesto 1918 ("interlacing of opposites and all contradictions") or his "Lecture on Dada" in 1922, which defines Dada as a quasi-Taoist "indifference" (allusion to Zhuangzi) 49. The concept of "creative indifference," very Nietzschean, is wonderfully well summarized by Hausmann in several post-Dada texts, at a time when he recurrently cites Gross and Friedländer:
[DADA] designates the Concretization of the Opposite Essence of Phenomena. [...]
No one was ever Dada except through a voluntary reversal of their entire Being, which was not ONE, but through innumerable facets of NOTHING-NESS.
[DADA emerged] from all possible attitudes of the imagery of Creative Indifference. [...]
Dada is the antagonist of the Self 50.
The opposing polarities, tangible in the phonetic and plastic domains, were implemented in the famous Dada evenings by a projection of the unconscious outward 51, to give it form and free oneself from it, which is attested by several articles in Die Freie Strasse. In Hausmann, this conflict of self with self, doubled by the conflict with the public, in extreme tension at times, was vital and contributed to the "invention of constructed spaces and situations" 52. How can one not think again of the Situationists?
When Carl Einstein Comes to Rival the Contributions of Gross and F. Jung
One could conclude this Berlin chapter with a nuance suggested by a recent chapter by Maria Stavrinaki 53, regarding Gross's influence on Hausmann: she claims that from 1917, Hausmann, influenced by Carl Einstein's anthropological sensitivity, would have distanced himself from the psychological sensitivity of Gross and Jung, and from the problematic of the "own" and the "foreign," deemed too expressionist, as it was based on a relationship of exteriority of the subject with the world. With the emergence of Dada, it was another relationship between the subject and reality that was imposed, embodied by the Dadaist montages, which attempted, in a sort of totemic anthropophagy, to incorporate the enemy world, the machine, to exorcise its evils. The external world was no longer the foreign to be rid of for the self to survive. In Synthetic Cinema of Painting (1918), Hausmann has this beautiful phrase: "man is simultaneous: a monster of his own and of his foreign" 54. At the same time, Salomo Friedländer's creative indifference and the idea of a creative center would have faded, Hausmann now assuming the absolute heterogeneity of things. This is up for discussion...
Hausmann and Gross: The Years 1919-1920, Political Evolution and Synthesis of Major Ideas
In 1919-20, Gross and Hausmann became politically radicalized in the revolutionary atmosphere. Both published in particular in the journal Die Erde (The Earth). Hausmann gradually abandoned Stirner's individualist anarchism, even in Der Einzige, in favor of communist anarchism and a transcendence, following Gross's new model, of the small self towards collectivism 55.
Gross: Publications of 1919-1920
On Gross's side, the intentions are clear, as can be seen in the announcement placed at the beginning of one of his articles, "The Intellectual Formation of the Revolutionary" 56 (1919) :
The author of this article would consider organizing at the Higher Community School of Proletarian Culture courses on the "psychology of revolution," with an introduction to the psychology of the unconscious (psychoanalytic psychology).
The articulation of psychoanalysis and politics is therefore still at the heart of the discourse, as evidenced by several developments on revolutionary pedagogy, inconceivable without listening to the inner conflict, and despite the interest in new approaches linked to Russian conceptions of technique and work, as can be seen in "Preliminary Works: On Teaching" (1920) 57. The article "Revolt and Morality in the Unconscious" (1920) 58 recalls that access to the unconscious and the recognition of the instinct of "mutual aid" highlighted by Kropotkin are the indispensable preliminaries to revolution, and deepens the critique of the peasant world as an economic organization justifying patriarchy and the oppression of women, while urban life puts an end to the ideology of the land and makes way for a beneficial immoralism. Nietzsche, Freud, Adler, Stekel, Paul Federn and his Society Without Fathers ("Preliminary Works: On Teaching") rub shoulders with Lounatcharsky ("The Intellectual Formation of the Revolutionary") or Fourier ("On the Reconstitution of the Truthful Man" 59, one of Gross's last texts). Three Essays on Inner Conflict 60 published also in 1920, the year of Gross's death, is a very accomplished synthesis of his thought, which develops the multiple sexual configurations resulting from the interactions of the inner conflict between the self and the other with homosexual and heterosexual drives, sadistic and masochistic, and social representations, in the form of intertwined pairs of opposites. One chapter studies "hospitalism" in times of war, and allows him to reaffirm childhood solitude and the vital need for the mother.
Matriarchy According to Gross and Hausmann
Another article from this period, "The Fundamentally Communist Conception of the Symbolism of Paradise" in 1919 61, warrants attention, as it significantly clarifies Gross's ideas on matriarchy: the biblical Genesis is identified there with the lost paradise of matriarchy, and original sin with the establishment of patriarchy and the appearance of sexual shame. A note specifies that it is Judaism that sealed patriarchy, contaminated Hellenism, Christianity, and Islam, and triumphed over the feminist and orgiastic cult of Astarte, this well-known figure of the Frei Strasse group 62, with multiple avatars: Salammbô, Salomé, or even Artemis of Ephesus in a text by Freud (Great is the Diana of the Ephesians, 1912) which, according to Jacques Le Rider 63, testifies to the crisis of a modernity caught between matriarchy and patriarchy. One could also say: between Gross's feminism and the pathological anti-feminism of Otto Weininger—absolute antithesis of Gross—whose theses had been developed in Sex and Character (1903).
Jacques Le Rider rightly emphasizes the fact that Gross, unlike Richard Beer-Hofmann 64, erased any phallic and mortiferous idea of the Law of the Mother, in favor of a pre-Raphaelite style Astarte. I refer to his masterful analyses on Kafka's The Castle, a work that metaphorically intertwines Otto Gross's matriarchal feminism and Otto Weininger's anti-feminism 65.
Under Hausmann's pen, Astarte, as we have seen, are the "Amazons" and "Clytemnestra." His 1919 articles in Die Erde all plead the cause of matriarchy—an indispensable stage of the Revolution—and sexual liberation. As examples: "The Notion of Possession in the Family and the Right to One's Own Body," in 1919, shows the political and gender issues as consubstantial, while "For the Suppression of the Bourgeois Feminine Type," the same year, takes sides for Otto Gross against Otto Weininger, whose mother/prostitute dichotomy Hausmann rejects 66.
As Cécile Bargues has shown, these theories, influenced by Gross, would haunt Hausmann long after Dada. Ibiza would be in his eyes "the land of Astarte" 67, one of whose sanctuaries he would discover. In the 1950s, he labeled the Oedipal theory a "police complex" and attacked the official institutions of psychoanalysis as emanations of patriarchal power 68...
Conclusion
The primary importance of Gross is to have established the link between psychoanalysis, the Expressionists, the anarchists, and the Dadaists, that is, three essential movements of the early 20th century.
His dissident psychoanalysis nourished Berlin Dadaism, alongside Franz Jung and Raoul Hausmann, who were prepared like him for this approach by their familiarity with the thoughts of revolt stemming from individualist currents, anarchism, Nietzsche, and the hypotheses of anthropologists sensitive to a burgeoning feminism.
The psychopolitical articulation that resulted from this dissident psychoanalysis prefigured the Freudian left, in contradiction with a Freud who had become pessimistic about the question of social change, once forgotten the democratic impulses of the Budapest speech in 1918 69. For Gross, on the contrary, psychoanalysis was at the service of revolution. But his revolution, more cultural than strictly political, was not that of a party. When Gross speaks of communism, it is a utopia. The question of the articulation between desire and class struggle does not arise directly with him, unlike Reich, for example. His revolution first aims for free sexuality and another mode of relation to the other, which allows for an end to solitude and sadomasochism, and frees women in a society that would no longer monetize maternal service against patriarchal rape.
Reich, in The Irruption of Sexual Morality 1932, writes that "matriarchy is characterized by great sexual freedom and the democracy of work" 70. All of Freud's ideas concerning the primitive horde are combated there 71. Erich Fromm, for his part, celebrates matriarchy as the "foundation of the principle of freedom and universal equality, of peace and love among men" 72. The chapter "Passages from Patriarchal Religions to Matriarchal Religions" in his The Art of Loving (1956) refers to Bachofen's ideas 73.
But today, no one historically credits the ideas of Mother Right, except Michel Onfray, in his Heretical Freudians (2013), an essay partly devoted to Gross 74, who omits to emphasize the fantastical dimension 75.
This myth of matriarchy, which benefited both Berlin Dadaism and Nazism, and which still inspires some feminist movements in Germany today 76, has been definitively questioned, among others, by the anthropologist Christophe Darmangeat in 2012, in Primitive Communism Is No Longer What It Was. On the Origins of the Oppression of Women 77. This does not prevent Emmanuel Todd, in The Origin of Family Systems (2011), from qualifying the belief in matriarchy as "one of the most beautiful errors of the human sciences"... which has well served the feminist cause! 78.
Finally, Gross came into contradiction with the idea of sublimation enunciated by Freud as early as 1908 in "Civilized Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Illness" 79, well before Civilization and Its Discontents (1929). The question of the relationship between the "pleasure principle" and the "reality principle," and that of sublimation through culture, were at the heart of the Freudian left, up to May 68 or Anti-Oedipus (1972), for which social production, under certain conditions, coincided with desiring production. Fenichel, like Freud, distanced himself from a Rousseauism that underestimated the complex nature of desire; Fromm's "culturalist" psychoanalysis thought of a psyche capable of making a pact with rational authority; but the most subtle synthesis is undoubtedly that of Marcuse (Eros and Civilization, 1955), who, while recognizing the civilizing necessity despite its repressive dimension, imagined a pleasure principle (Eros) capable of subverting the reality principle, that is, the deathly order (Thanatos).
One can reproach Gross, as Jacques Le Rider does 80, who emphasizes his vocation for self-destruction, that his desire for revolution could not surpass the transgressive experiences of Munich, Ascona, or Berlin, insufficient to ensure revolutionary legitimacy, and that he was content with a dream of a primitive paradise, without concrete suggestions to overcome the divide between reality and utopia.
Yes, Gross's ideas are dreams, sometimes chaotic, more than rational propositions.
At the very least, they allowed, in Berlin, to nourish that baby thirsty for Being... which was called Dada!
1 Jacques Le Rider lists the literary works of the 20th century that, more or less cryptically, have taken the life and ideas of this extraordinary character as their theme, in Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution (cf. note 4), p. 74-80.
2 Marie-Laure de Cazotte, Mon nom est Otto Gross, Albin Michel, 2018, 352 p.
3 Jacques Le Rider, « Loi de la mère/Loi du père. Autour d’Otto Gross », Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité, PUF, 1st edition, 1990, p. 152-176, 2nd revised and expanded edition, PUF, 1994, reprinted in Quadrige paperback, 2000. 4 Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, Éditions du Sandre, 2011, preface by Jacques Le Rider, translated from German by Jeanne Étoré, 226 p. This work is an expanded reissue, by the same author, of: Otto Gross, Révolution sur le divan, Éditions Solin, 1988, 150 p.
5 The hill of Monte Verità was the cradle of various utopian communities bringing together notable intellectuals and artists of the early 20th century, communists and anarchists on the run or fugitives, rebellious young bourgeois, sexual immoralists, theosophists, naturists, vegetarians, adepts of oriental cults or revolutionary choreographies like that of the Hungarian Rudolf Lábán, Dadaists, including Hugo Ball, founder of the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, etc.
6 The details of these events were recounted by Jacques Le Rider, in Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 56-62, and vividly reported in the memoirs of F. Jung, Le Chemin vers le bas. Considérations d’un révolutionnaire allemand sur une grande époque (1900-1950), Agone, 2007; this work is the reissue of Le Scarabée-torpille: considérations sur une grande époque, Ludd, 1993.
7 See on this subject the comments of Lionel Richard, D’une apocalypse à l’autre, Somogy – Éditions d’art, 1998, p. 35-36.
8 Cf. Jacques Le Rider, « Histoires de familles: les Gross et les Schreber », in Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité, op. cit., p. 165-167; and Elisabeth Roudinesco, « Disciples et dissidents », Sigmund Freud en son temps et dans le nôtre, p. 184-185.
9 For details on the relations between Gross and Kafka, cf. Jacques Le Rider, Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 78-80.
10 Otto Gross, « Violence parentale », Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 89-93; first published in the journal Die Zukunft, Berlin, vol. 65, 1908.
11 All these aspects are developed in the preface by Jacques Le Rider, in Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 18-20.
12 Letter from Jung to Freud, September 25, 1907, cited by Jacques Le Rider, Ibid., p. 23.
13 See the commented excerpts by Jacques Le Rider of a letter from Max Weber to Else Jaffé, September 13, 1907, damning for Otto Gross, in Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit. p. 83-86.
14 Letters from Jung to Freud, June 19, 1908, and June 4, 1909, cited by Jacques Le Rider, Ibid., p. 39 and 41-42.
15 Russel Jacoby, « L’éveil du printemps: les analystes en rebelles », p. 58, in Otto Fenichel: destins de la gauche freudienne, trans. P.-E. Dauzat, Paris, PUF, 1986, p. 49-75; on Otto Gross, p. 52 et seq.
16 Fenichel delivered this lecture to gain admission to the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society in 1916.
18 Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 95-104; Die Aktion, vol. 3, April 2, 1913.
19 See Patrick Lhot, « Otto Gross (1877-1920) et la théorie du “Conflit du Propre et de l’Étranger” », L’indifférence créatrice de Raoul Hausmann. Aux sources du dadaïsme, Presses Universitaires de Provence, 2013, p. 79-94.
20 Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 175-181; the book was published in Vienna and Leipzig, Éditions Braumüller, 1909.
21 This citation and the following ones are from « Comment surmonter la crise culturelle ? », art. cit.
22 Letter from Jung to Freud, September 25, 1907, cf. note 12.
23 Otto Gross, Psychanalyse et Révolution, op. cit., p. 99-104; Die Aktion, vol. 3, November 22, 1913.
24 Ibid., p. 107-109; Die Aktion, vol. 3, December 6, 1913.
25 Ibid., p. 115-128; journal Zentralblatt für Psychoanalyse und Psychotherapie, vol. 4, Wiesbaden, 1914.
26 For a detailed study of the ideological evolution of Raoul Hausmann, see Hubert van den Berg and Lidia Głuchowska, « Raoul Hausmann, un anarchiste ? Quelques réflexions sur les opinions politiques d’Hausmann pendant la République de Weimar », in Raoul Hausmann et les avant-gardes – Timothy Benson, Hanne Bergius, Ina Blom (eds.), Les presses du réel, 2014, p. 69-112.
27 See Guillaume Paoli, « Landauer, Gross, Mühsam: histoires de famille », À contretemps, n° 48, May 2014.
28 Jacques Le Rider, « Individualisme, solitude, identité en crise », Modernité viennoise et crises de l’identité, op. cit., p. 39-56.
29 Hubert van den Berg and Lidia Głuchowska, « Raoul Hausmann, un anarchiste ? Quelques réflexions sur les opinions politiques d’Hausmann pendant la République de Weimar », art. cit., p. 77.
30 Published in Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada, 1958, Éditions Allia, 2004, New expanded edition, established and annotated by Marc Dachy, 2004, p. 33-35; Der Einzige, Berlin, n° 14, April 20, 1919.
31 For an overview of the essential influences of young Raoul Hausmann, see Eva Züchner, « Aux sources de la révolte », in cat. Raoul Hausmann 1886-1991, under the direction of Bernard Ceysson, Musée d’Art Moderne de Saint-Étienne, 1994.
32 Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada, Éditions Allia, 2004, preface by Marc Dachy.
33 See Hypnos, Esthétique, littérature et inconscients en Europe (1900-1968), Éditions L’improviste, 2009, p. 213-225; see also the article by Henri Béhar, « Dada est un microbe vierge, la psychanalyse une maladie dangereuse », p. 191-212.
34 Tristan Tzara, Manifeste Dada 1918, Œuvres complètes 1, Édition établie par H. Béhar, Paris, Flammarion, 1975, p. 364.
35 Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada, op. cit., p. 55-56.
36 Ibid., p. 31.
37 See the interesting testimony of Franz Jung on the Frei Strasse in a 1960 letter published by Georges Hugnet, Dictionnaire du Dadaïsme, Éditions Jean-Claude Simoën, 1976, p. 157-160.
38 Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada, op. cit., p. 31.
39 Ibid., p. 27. 40 Text published online: https://anarchistischebibliothek.org/…/otto-gross-vom-konflikt-des – …
41 Patrick Lhot, in a detailed study of the journal Die Frei Strasse, its issues, and its articles, describes these wood engravings in the chapter « Raoul Hausmann et Franz Jung: le cercle de la Freie Strasse », L’indifférence créatrice de Raoul Hausmann. Aux sources du dadaïsme, op. cit., p. 105.
42 See the analyses of Hubert van den Berg, « Raoul Hausmann, un anarchiste ? », art. cit., p. 81.
43 Raoul Hausmann, Courrier Dada, op. cit., p. 26.
44 See Patrick Lhot, « L’anti-expressionnisme de Dada-Berlin. Le rôle de Richard Huelsenbeck », L’indifférence créatrice de Raoul Hausmann. Aux sources du dadaïsme, op. cit., p. 114-138.
45 Raoul Hausmann, « Club Dada Berlin 1918-1921 », 1966, Courrier Dada, op. cit., p. 164.