Otto Gross: minor character in David Cronenberg’s New Film, A Dangerous Method – major character in Eric Koch’s 2008 novel, Premonitions.

If you have seen the film, you will remember Otto Gross, a handsome character, played by Vincent Cassel, who gave the advice never to repress any sexual urges.

In Eric Koch’s novel – written without any reference to Jung’s love affair with Sabina Spielrein – he gives the same advice. Freud first welcomed him as an unusually gifted disciple, then rejected him because Gross turned out to be too radical for him, and too unethical.

Here are some extracts from the introduction:

“He was the nearest approach to the romantic idea of genius I have ever met, and he also illustrated the supposed resemblance of genius to madness.” Ernest Jones, Free Association, Memoirs of a Psychoanalyst, page 173.

“He is a man known to very few by name…