The approximation of T. Burrow

 GROUP METHOD OF ANALYSIS or GROUPANALYSIS[1]. (T. Burrow 1)

The first to call his way of analyzing in group the Group Method of Analysis was Trigant Burrow —a North American physician, psychoanalyst and doctor in Experimental Psychology, analyzed by C. G. Jung in Zürich in 1910. It was a curious circumstance, a devastating challenge to the psychoanalytic method that led to discover, name and develop groupanalysis. During a process of psychoanalysis, Burrow interpreted a dream of his analysand. The latter did not accept the interpretation adducing that if his analyst was in his place he would neither accept it. Burrow as an analyst had heard such declarations before, however, in this case a particular respect for his analysand and being a born investigator, eventually took him to accept the challenge and the joint inquiry took them to an impás[2]. In the attempt to overcome it, Burrow appealed to the group of his associates to jointly investigate the problems in question, which in turn took them to six years of investigation in group and to write the foundational paper The Laboratory Method in Psychoanalysis[3], presented to his psychoanalyst colleagues at the international congress of psychoanalysis of Bad Homburg in 1925 and the following The Group Method of Analysis[4] read before the Washington Psychoanalytic Society also in 1925 and published in German in Imago en 1926.

Moreover, Burrow writes and discusses with this group of collaborators his first book, The social basis of consciousness, the result of many years of group investigation.  The interested reader will find here the Preface[5] of this book and the four writings already mentioned which transmit the context and the original ideas and thought of the discovery of Burrow. This author is a giant between giants. The work of Burrow is the repressed link which goes from psychoanalysis to groupanalysis, from the human individual to the group, from the individual neurosis to the social neurosis and the disorders we suffer from in today’s world.

 

GROUP METHOD OF ANALYSIS or PHYLOANALYSIS (T. Burrow 2)

THE LABORATORY METHOD IN PSYCHOANALYSIS

As commented in “The Group Method of Analysis or Groupanalysis” (link with previous entry of glossary) it was investigating an impás with the psychoanalytic method that Burrow discovered and developed groupanalysis. In a first paper of the same epoch he names his way of analyzing in group together with his associates “The laboratory method in psychoanalysis” for the following reasons:
Beyond being a physician and psychoanalyst, Burrow was a doctor in experimental psychology, accustomed to the laboratory method in psychology, having investigated during years the complex problem of attention. During that epoch, the scientific laboratory was created by the evolutionists as an instrument princeps of investigation in the biological sciences, sustained by 1) a base of observation that rests on a continuum phylico [from Latin fílum=species], a shared base that permits the comparison between the elements of the species in question, and 2) a method of comparison which perceives the particular element of the species in relation to the phylic substratum. Moreover, at that time no primary continuum in the mental or functional sphere had been recognized which would constitute the substratum of individual life and make possible the recognition of pathological divergences. Burrow considers that Freud was the first to use a laboratory technique in the field of human mental processes, but that this innovation meets with the social opposition of tenacious inhibitions in front of this laboratory scrutiny, particularly between psychoanalysts. It is these resistances which impede that the laboratory of scientific investigation takes its place in the subjective sphere. Burrow sustains that “to arrive at a phylogenetic substratum of the mental sphere, it is necessary to apply the method Freud had developed in the treatment of individuals under de facto laboratory conditions or group analysis”.

So, it is not surprising that Burrow creates his groupanalysis as an instrument of the scientific laboratory destined to resolve in a wider group the problem of the smallest human group of two individuals, in this case Trigant Burrow and Clarence Shields. We include here the accounts[6] of the analyst and the analysand, two presentations[7]of Burrow himself and the preface[8][9] of a first book widely discussed in that group, all of them invaluable testimonies of those origins of group investigation. Of all these writings, “The Laboratory Method in Psychoanalysis, its origins and development” is the one which better describes the foundational context of the method.
Burrow appeals to the group of associates which supposedly represents “the norm of the species, the phylum”, which he hopes will permit him in turn recognize the pathology of the “insurmountable differences” between the individuals of the species. Here is the origin of the Group Method of Analysis which Burrow calls also and at the same time Phyloanalysis. It is about the development of a social technique in handling problems which, being of a personal and ontogenetic nature, are equally of a social and phylogenetic one. The Group Method of Analysis leads him to conceive the “The I-Person-Complex” —a partial expression of the personality or affective identity in the relation with others, in sum the projective and symbolic processes which produce divisions and schisms in the relationships— and to identify  “The Structure of Insanity” from which humanity suffers. Phyloanalysis takes Burrow to investigate the effects of these schisms in the organism as a whole, naming two types of attention: cotention, a pattern of attention of the whole organism in its relation to the context, and ditention, which shows that global attention as interfered by phantasies and desires.

Other relevant terms coined by T. Burrow in: Burrow,T. (1968). Science and Man´s Behavior. New York: Greenwood Press