Healing Wounded History

Jung and his ‘Twin-Brother’1:

From Sibling-Rivalry and Fratricide towards Redemption

Image credit: Stone-Balance and Photograph: Gottfried M. Heuer, Iona, Scotland, 2014.

‘I have only mixed with anarchists and I declare myself to be an anarchist. I am a psychoanalyst and from my experience, I have gained the insight that the existing order of the family is a bad one. Authority in the family as the source of authority per se has to be changed – [. . .] and since I want everything changed, I am an anarchist.’2 – This is what Otto Gross told the psychiatrists some hundred years ago. They diagnosed his politics as pathological.

‘Healing Wounded History’3 – in terms of an engagement with the past in order to heal its wounds and hopefully achieve a better future, we might see therapists as historians of the individual – or a small group – and the historian as the therapist of the wider collective. Just as therapy has a spiritual dimension, the philosopher Walter Benjamin correspondingly calls upon the historian to ‘be a prophet turned backwards’, 4 and invokes the angel ofhistory: His face is turned towards the past. [. . .] The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has got caught in his wings [. . .] that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned.5

Otto Gross, 1877 – 1920, constitutes a wound in our collective past: barely a year after his death, a friend wrote of him as ‘known only to very few by name – apart from a handful of psychiatrists and secret policeme – and among those few only to those who plucked his feathers to adorn their own posteriors.’6 Our gathering here this morning, then, is part of an undoing of the damnatio memoriae, as the Romans called the efforts to write somebody out of history: in helping the repressed to return, we are, together, healing wounded history.

I shall begin by introducing Gross’s life and work, followed by a brief outline of my approach to history, which originated from concepts Gross was the first to formulate. I then speak about the relationship between Gross, Jung – and Freud, and how the latter two conspired, with Gross’s father, to silence him.

‘A man is only then truly dead, when nobody thinks of him anymore.’7