For more than half a century, Otto Gross (1877–1920) was a forgotten figure in the annals of mental medicine and intellectual culture. The man whose name and reputation had once been familiar to many professionals who worked in the fields of psychoanalysis and psychiatry in German-speaking Europe, and who had moved effortlessly in bohemian, anarchistic and counter-cultural circles, had become a non-entity at the time of the fiftieth anniversary of his death. Then, in 1974, the American literary scholar Martin Green published a study of the von Richthofen sisters Frieda and Else, both of whom had once been lovers and friends of Gross (one of them belonged to the Heidelberg circle of Max Weber, while the other married D. H. Lawrence). It was in Green's book that the reading public first learnt about an eccentric psychoanalyst, anarchist and social dreamer who had socialized or worked with Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, Emil Kraepelin, Wilhelm Stekel, Franz Werfel, Franz Kafka, Max Brod, Erich Mühsam and a number of other writers, many of whom were influenced and excited by Gross's provocative ideas and his extraordinary personality.

The publication of the correspondence between Freud and Jung in 1974 brought Gross's name to the attention of psychoanalysts and scholars interested in the history of psychoanalysis. In their correspondence, Freud and Jung made many references to their colleague who was also unsuccessfully treated by Jung at the Burghölzli mental hospital in 1908. It was now becoming clear to the scholarly community that someone called Otto Gross had once been a well-known psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who interacted with some of the leading figures in the field of mental medicine. Then, in the late 1970s, the first scholarly study devoted to Otto Gross was published.