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Title: Overcoming Cultural Crisis Author: Otto Gross Date: 1913 Language: en Topics: psychology, philosophy, revolution, individualist anarchism, culture Source: https://libcom.org/library/anarchism-documentary-history-libertarian-ideas-volume-1-2
The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of revolution: i.e.,
this is what it is appointed to become because it ferments insurrection
within the psyche, and liberates individuality from the bonds of its own
unconscious. It is appointed to make us inwardly capable of freedom,
appointed because it is the preparatory work for the revolution.
The incomparable revaluation of all values, with which the imminent
future will be filled, begins in this present time with Nietzsche's
thinking about the depths of the soul and with Freud's discovery of the
so-called psychoanalytic technique. This latter is the practical method
which for the first time makes it possible to liberate the unconscious
for empirical knowledge: i.e., for us it has now become possible to know
ourselves. With this a new ethic is born, which will rest upon the moral
imperative to seek real knowledge about oneself and one's fellow men.
What is so overpowering in this new obligation to apprehend the truth is
that until today we have known nothing of the question that matters
incomparably above all others-the question of what is intrinsic,
essential in our own being, our inner life, our self and that of our
fellow human beings; we have never even been in a position to inquire
about these things. What we are learning to know is that, as we are
today, each one of us possesses and recognizes as his own only a
fraction of the totality embraced by his psychic personality.
In every psyche without exception the unity of the functioning whole,
the unity of consciousnesses, is torn in two, an unconscious has split
itself off and maintains its existence by keeping itself apart from the
guidance and control of consciousness, apart from any kind of
self-observation, especially that directed at itself.
I must assume that knowledge of the Freudian method and its important
results is already widespread. Since Freud we understand all that is
inappropriate and inadequate in our mental life to be the results of
inner experiences whose emotional content excited intense conflict in
us. At the time of those experiences-especially in early childhood-the
conflict seemed insoluble, and they were excluded from the continuity of
the inner life as it is known to the conscious ego. Since then they have
continued to motivate us from the unconscious in an uncontrollably
destructive and oppositional way. I believe that what is really decisive
for the occurrence of repressions is to be found in the inner conflict..
.rather than in relation to the sexual impulse. Sexuality is the
universal motive for an infinite number of internal conflicts, though
not in itself but as the object of a sexual morality which stands in
insoluble conflict with everything that is of value and belongs to
willing and reality.
It appears that at the deepest level the real nature of these conflicts
may always be traced back to one comprehensive principle, to the
conflict between that which belongs to oneself and that which belongs to
the other, between that which is innately individual and that which has
been suggested to us, i.e. that which is educated or otherwise forced
into us.
This conflict of individuality with all all authority that has
penetrated into our own innermost self belongs more to the period of
childhood than to any other time.
The tragedy is correspondingly greater as a person's individuality is
more richly endowed, is stronger in its own particular nature. The
earlier and the more intensely that the capacity to withstand suggestion
and interference begins its protective function, the earlier and the
more intensely will the self-divisive conflict be deepened and
exacerbated. The only natures to be spared are those in whom the
predisposition towards individuality is so weakly developed and is so
little capable of resistance that, under the pressure of suggestion from
social surroundings, and the influence of education, it succumbs, in a
manner of speaking, to atrophy and disappears altogether-natures whose
guiding motives are at last composed entirely of alien, handed-down
standards of evaluation and habits of reaction. In such second-rate
characters a certain apparent health can sustain itself, i.e., a
peaceful and harmonious functioning of the whole of the soul or, more
accurately, of what remains of the soul. On the other hand, each
individual who stands in any way higher than this normal contemporary
state of things is not, in existing conditions, in a position to escape
pathogenic conflict and to attain his individual health, i.e., the full
harmonious development of the highest possibilities of his innate
individual character.
It is understood from all this that such characters hitherto, no matter
in what outward form they manifest themselves-whether they are opposed
to laws and morality, or lead us positively beyond the average, or
collapse internally and become ill-have been perceived with either
disgust, veneration or pity as disturbing exceptions whom people try to
eliminate. It will come to be understood that, already today, there
exists the demand to approve these people as the healthy, the warriors,
the progressives, and to learn from and through them.
Not one of the revolutions in recorded history has succeeded in
establishing freedom for individuality. They have petered out
ineffectively, each time as precursors of a new bourgeoisie, they have
ended with the precipitate desire of people to reinstall themselves in
conditions generally agreed to be normal. They have collapsed because
the revolutionary of yesterday carried authority within himself. Only
now can it be recognized that the root of all authority lies in the
family, that the combination of sexuality and authority, as it shows
itself in the patriarchal family still prevailing today, claps every
individuality in chains.
The times of crisis in advanced cultures have so far always been
attended by complaints about the loosening of the ties of marriage and
family life ...but people could never hear in this "immoral tendency"
the life-affirming ethical crying out of humanity for redemption.
Everything went to wrack and ruin, and the problem of emancipation from
original sin, from the enslavement of women for the sake of their
children, remained unsolved.
The revolutionary of today, who with the help of the psychology of the
unconscious sees the relations between the sexes in a free and
propitious future, fights against rape in its most primordial form,
against the father and against patriarchy.
The coming revolution is the revolution for matriarchy [mother right].
It does not matter under what outward form and by what means it comes
about.