Sexual Revolutions:
Otto Gross, Psychoanalysis and Culture
10th International Otto Gross Congress
International Association for Otto Gross Studies
XVIII Annual Conference
Moscow Association for Analytical Psychology
Moscow, 20 – 22 October 2017
‘The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution!’ (Gross)
Organised by Lev Hegai, the congress coincided with the 100th anniversary of the October Revolution – hence on the flyer the battleship Aurora that, in 1917, gave the starting shot 1917 in St. Petersburg. Keynote speakers were Dr. Birgit Heuer, bpf, and Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer, AJA, London. (Natalia Pavlikova most kindly did the translating.)
For a long time, sexual liberation was a forbidden theme in Soviet Russia. For the first time in the history of post-Soviet Russia an interdisciplinary Conference was devoted to the Sexual Revolution. Well-known Russian scientists – not only Jungian, Freudian and Lacanian analysts – but different specialists in history, art, philosophy, literature and religion were presenting.
The three-day-congress attracted over a hundred participants from all over Russia as well as England, Scotland, Ireland, Finland and Germany. Video-recording enabled some forty others to participate via Skype from Belarus, Germany, Kazakhstan, Moldova, the Ukraine, and the United Arab Republic. The videos are all available online. For access please contact Elena Khandurova at elena.khandurova@gmail.com
Coincident with the 10th International Otto Gross Congress, Dr. Gottfried M. Heuer’s book Sexual Revolutions (Routledge, 2011) was published in Russian.
In his opening address, Dr. Gottfried Heuer outlined the roots of Otto Gross’s psychology in Russian philosophy: well over a hundred years ago, Gross used Afrikan Aleksandrovich Špir’s considerations of das Eigene (that which is one’s own) and das Fremde (that which is the other’s) – i.e. self and other – together with Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin’s anarchist concepts of mutual aid and mutuality in equality to initiate intersubjectivity and ‘the relational turn’ in psychoanalysis.
Presentations included
- Dr. Birgit Heuer, ‘The words we work with that work on us: clinical paradigm and cumulative relational trauma’, a paper she had given earlier this year at the SAP Conference in New York (published in JAP, 62:5), and a workshop on this subject
- Dr. Gottfried Heuer ‘The Sacral-Sexual Revolution’, and a detailed review of the film A Dangerous Method
- Dr. Jasbinder Garnerman, Ireland, ‘The Feminine’
- Dr. Giorgio Tricarico, Italy-Finland, ‘Porn as a symbol of the current world’
Russian presenters were
- Dr. Nina Savchenkova, ‘Sexual Revolution in the Context of Psychoanalysis and Postmodern Philosophy’
- Dr. Aiten Yuran, ‘Possible Answer of Freud and Lacan to Alain Badiou’s Assumption of Crisis of Sexuality’
- Archpriest Andrew Lorgus, ‘Sexual Revolution and Orthodox Christianity’
- Dr. Evgeny Zjarinov, ‘Sexual Revolution in Modern Literature’
- Oleg Telemsky, ‘Sexual revolution. Past, Present and Future’
- Dr. Oksana Timofeeva, ‘We have never had Sex’
- Aurelia Korotetskaya, ‘About Love. Psychoanalytic Essay’
- Dr. Valery Leibin, ‘Otto Gross as Ideologist and Practitioner of Free Love’
- Dr. Stanislav Raevsky, ‘New Sexual Revolution and Psychological Complex’
- Dr. Viktoria Muskvik, ‘Culturology on Sexual Revolution’
Simultaneously, parallel workshops were held at the Institute of Psychology of Russian Academy of Sciences.
‘My concluding words about the healing of wounded history both in terms of so many people gathering on the subject of Otto Gross, a political and psychoanalytic revolutionary Jung and Freud tried to delete from history, as well as in terms of the most generous invitation and reception of my wife and myself in a country which, at the time I was born, had been under assault by our country, costing so many millions of Russian lives, received a standing ovation, with many of us in tears’ (Gottfried M. Heuer).