At the next Oxford Jung Group meeting, on October 4th, 2019, in the Friends Meeting House on St Giles, there will be a talk by Dr. Gottfried Heuer:
‘The Sacredness of Love’
or: ‘Relationship as Third, as Religion.’
Otto Gross’ Concepts of Relationship Today
In his presentation, Dr. Heuer focuses on three different themes to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the early psychoanalyst Otto Gross (1877 – 1920) that reverberates through a number of disciplines. I shall link his ideas to leading-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: in each instance, they center on what Gross formulated as ‘replacing the will to power with the will to relating’ – between self and other, aiming at a mutuality between equals to free the capacity to love (and be loved!), which he always understood simultaneously as interpersonal as well as intrapersonal, a pre-formulation of the idea of ‘Make Love, Not War!’
The aim of the presentation is not a nostalgic look into the past, but to contribute towards creating a better future. Gross himself wrote, ‘The psychology of the unconscious is the philosophy of the revolution’; and a recent commentator said, ‘A hundred years ago, Otto Gross wrote the theory for the therapy of tomorrow.’