This is a study of utopian elements in the writings of four psychological authors: Otto Gross, Carl G. Jung, Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm. They were all psychoanalytic renegades in one way or another, for after a period of collaboration with Freud (Gross, Jung and Reich), or with the faithful guardians of the psychoanalytic doctrine (Fromm), they were renounced as revisionists or stigmatized as mentally disturbed by Freud and his loyal cadre of followers. Consequently, they either retreated from the nascent psychoanalytic movement voluntarily (as did Jung) or were more or less forced to leave it (as did Gross, Reich and Fromm). As this book demonstrates, these four authors started to display utopian propensities only after their break with Freudian psychoanalysis.

The purpose of this book is to be the first to analyse historically the utopian elements in the writings of these four authors, and to demonstrate that, while they saw themselves as healers, explorers of the unconscious and, at best, political activists and proponents of specific belief systems, their thought patterns included distinct visionary and prophetic elements that belong squarely to the Western tradition of utopian thought. It is quite understandable that they did not openly refer to their ideas as ‘utopian’ or place any of them within this tradition, because it did not exactly boost an author's professional and intellectual status if his ideas were identified as representing utopianism – that is, idle, ‘non-scientific’ dreaming.

I have chosen to examine the ideas of these particular authors because they exemplify psychodynamic utopianism better than any other psychoanalysts or psychoanalytically-inspired philosophers. There have been psychodynamic authors (such as Alfred Adler or R. D. Laing) as well as non-medical authors inspired by psychoanalysis (such as Herbert Marcuse) who expressed utopian ideas in some of their writings, but the point of this book is not to compile an exhaustive catalogue of all psychodynamic texts where utopian elements are discernible, but to examine in a historical context the utopian elements in the ideas of four authors, whose propensity to psychoutopian visions characterizes not only a certain publication or a certain period of their lives, but their very approach to questions concerning the self, morality, society, culture and the good life.