‘The sacredness of love’ or ‘relationship as third’: otto gross' concepts of relationship today

Abstract

The paper focuses on three different themes to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the early psychoanalyst, Otto Gross (1877–1920), which reverberates through a number of disciplines. With some of his ideas, Gross goes way beyond modernity and post‐modernity towards a post‐postmodern revolutionizing of both individual as well as collective – political – ways of understanding relating. These are being linked to cutting‐edge discoveries in three realms: firstly, neurobiology and research into human behavioural as well as maturational processes; secondly an unusual understanding – albeit not entirely new – of political justice and, thirdly, philosophical‐analytical theories of relating. Around the time of the recent millennium, completely new concepts and ideas were formulated which both fundamentally verify some of Gross' concepts and, of course, take them further. These current ideas are also linked with regard to a possible aim: in each instance, they focus on what Otto Gross some one hundred years ago first described as the transformation of the will to power between self and other – with the aim of freeing a capacity to love, a capacity to relate that Gross always understood simultaneously as interpersonal as well as intrapersonal and intrapsychic.