Author Description

Product Description German language edition of Austrian psychoanalyst and philosopher Otto Gross' work from 1901-1904. About the Author Despite his outstanding discovery of diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, Austrian-born psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Otto Gross (1877-1920) may be best read today for his continuation of the philosophy of consciousness through his merging of it with a new approach that is at once neuropsychological, bio-social, and historical. The son of an internationally famous criminal psychologist, Gross' interest in psychopathology led him in 1901-2 to formulate a concept of mind use as the basis of mental illness. From 1901-1906 Gross worked in his native Graz under Gabriel Anton, whose theory of compensation became crucial for the development of his own ideas, including the bio-philosophical concept of "signal orientation" in 1904. His model of consciousness, also indebted to a unique understanding of compensation, soon brought him into conflict with Freud, whom he publicly supported in 1907 but of whose narrow view of sexuality he became increasingly critical. A victim of drug abuse and controversial for his radical approached to therapy, Gross quit his position under Kraepelin at the world-famous Munich psychiatric clinic in 1907 and spent his remaining years as a psychoanalyst and author. His name is linked with the German anarchist movement of the early twentieth century as well as with Expressionist authors, the Dadaist Raoul Hausmann, and Franz Kafka. Gross' foremost interest was the origin, nature and development of human conflict, as well as its potential resolution. He approached conflict both phylogenetically as the result of the harmonious antagonism between the two components of the survival drive being altered early in the course of human prehistory and ontogenetically as the frustrated anticipation of the infant that the components of the survival drive develop harmoniously.