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Forum > Research on Anarchism > Life and Society > Gender and Sexuality: Views, Traditions and
Experiences > COHN, Jesse. " Sex and the anarchist unconscious : A brief history"

COHN, Jesse. " Sex and the anarchist

unconscious : A brief history"
Monday 27 June 2016, Contributor : CREAGH Ronald

Sexualities 13(4), p. 413–431.

Author’s 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 Mu¨hsam,
Margarethe Hardegger – over sexuality and the ‘newscience’ of psychoanalysis. At stake in the dispute
are questions that continue tohaunt anarchist thought and practice in the 21st century: What ‘forms’
can andought libertarian sexual culture take? What constitutes a libertarian politics of marriageand the
family? Does psychoanalysis constitute a complement to the anarchist tradition,a crucial supplement to
its logic, or a perilous substitute?