Sex and the anarchist unconscious: A brief history

Abstract

‘We need form, not formlessness!’ In Gustav Landauer’s plaintive cry echoes a century-old controversy among the most singular minds of an entire generation of anarchists — Otto Gross, Erich Mühsam, Margarethe Hardegger — over sexuality and the ‘new science’ of psychoanalysis. At stake in the dispute are questions that continue to haunt anarchist thought and practice in the 21st century: What ‘forms’ can and ought libertarian sexual culture take? What constitutes a libertarian politics of marriage and the family? Does psychoanalysis constitute a complement to the anarchist tradition, a crucial supplement to its logic, or a perilous substitute?