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?