{"id":2082,"date":"2013-08-20T05:18:51","date_gmt":"2013-08-20T12:18:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.grupdanalisi.org\/english-content\/juan-campos-a-life-work-in-groups\/1988-the-lifwynn-foundation-and-trigant-burrow\/"},"modified":"2017-07-10T11:23:05","modified_gmt":"2017-07-10T11:23:05","slug":"1988-the-lifwynn-foundation-and-trigant-burrow","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.grupdanalisi.org\/en\/english-content\/juan-campos-a-life-work-in-groups\/1988-the-lifwynn-foundation-and-trigant-burrow\/","title":{"rendered":"1988 The Lifwynn Foundation and Trigant Burrow"},"content":{"rendered":"

1980-1998 From Groupanalysis to Group of Analysis (Grup d\u2019An\u00e0lisi) 4<\/h3>\n

1988 The Lifwynn Foundation\u00a0 and Trigant Burrow<\/h2>\n

\"Burrow\"<\/a>The contact and mutual communication with the Lifwynn Foundation and its members is without doubt a very important experience for Juan Campos and his colleagues, leaving its imprint on the creative and continuing change of the newly founded groupanalytic space of Grup d\u2019An\u00e1lisi Barcelona. As he describes in \u201cBeyond Dichotomy: the orientation of Trigant Burrow<\/a>\u201d, \u00a0in 1988, by chance he enters into contact with the Lifwynn Foundation on the occasion of a heated controversy about the person and work of Trigant Burrow that flared up in the pages of the journal Group Analysis in relation to a review of the book of Alfreda Galt, author of collected writings under the title Trigant Burrow: Towards Social Sanity and Human Survival<\/i>. The critical tone of this review was such that the editor of the journal was obliged to present in the same number a more positive point of view of the work of Trigant Burrow by Max Rosenbaum. It was the communication of the latter that led Juan to the Lifwynn Foundation and to establish a dialogue with the then Secretary Alfreda Galt. He discovered that this organization was not only still alive, but that it was the first \u201cstudy group in groupanalysis\u201d that applied to its own social organization and administration the groupanalytic principles executed in its studies of personal and social neurosis<\/span>. It was what he found most attractive of this group founded by Burrow.<\/p>\n

Hans Syz, although not anymore very active with his 96 years of age, gave Juan his last paper, a large and interesting summary of the work of Burrow<\/a> to which Juan added in turn his long commentary (1990 Comentario de JCA<\/a>, Spanish version) which shows his own interests in that work: first of all, the \u201cconspiracies of silence\u201d of which Syz speaks. Although it is years that the Lifwynn Foundation makes efforts in conserving and spreading the writings of Burrow, the obstacles in doing so are insurmountable. In second place, there are the quotes made out of context or with bad intention by eminent psychoanalyst colleagues as for example Freud himself, Jones, Sandor Rado, and Peter Gay, the latter on top of it being a professor of history at Yale University where the work of Burrow deposited.<\/p>\n

Another question of maximum importance, according to Juan, is what concerns the \u201cradically group aspect\u201d of Burrow\u2019s groupanalysis. We have to recognize that Burrow was precursor not only of the group psychotherapies \u2014which he never practiced\u2014 but also of the therapeutic communities. For the 1991 Symposium of the SEPTG Hanne Campos prepared a Monographic Bulletin \u201cTherapeutic Community and\/or Therapy of the Community\u201d in which the Lifwynn Foundation has the place it merits. As Juan points out in his Commentaries to the paper of Syz: \u201cThe problem which confronts the therapeutic communities in reference to the community in general in which they are inserted is the same with which Trigant Burrow and the Lifwynn Foundation found themselves confronted in reference to the so-called \u201canalytic community\u201d the moment\u00a0 that, in 1925 in the Bad Homburg Congress, they decide to make public their conclusions of the first seven years of investigation with the \u201cgroup method of analysis\u201d. There Juan shows once again how the resistances to accept the hypothesis of the mind as a matrix of transpersonal processes pass from Freud to his followers, from analysts to analysands, from generation to generation.<\/p>\n

The resistances that Juan Campos encounters in his investigations of the: what and how of training \u2014contents and methods\u2014 take him to the question of the appropriateness of the contexts \u2014the containers\u2014 of the groupanalytic training and practice. In his investigations Juan starts from the advances made by Foulkes, widening them with his own concept of professional plexus[1]<\/a>. There he states that \u201ctherapy is a process which results from the interaction of two networks of persons, the one of the patient and his plexus of which the latter is a nodal point of symptomatic behaviour, of distorted communication and transpersonal disorder; and the one of the therapist, with his own personal plexus and the one of his scientific and professional affiliations. Of the last, says Juan, unfortunately few therapists are conscious.\u201d\u00a0 During these investigations he discovers resistances to admitting these hypotheses and to contemplating the changes he points out on the part of colleagues as well as training institutions. In two epoch-making papers[2]<\/a> Juan elaborates on the resistances to change which, in his opinion, arise from the relationship of groupanalysis with psychoanalysis and from the impact of the individualistic and authoritarian approach in the development supposedly group oriented and democratic. But he also speaks of the hope that groupanalysis brings with it to make the necessary steps towards a change in training of the professionals which are coherent with a groupanalytic conception. According to the author in the process of training the circle of the small group expands to convert into a round table resting on the theoretical level on the tripod of the network theory of neurosis, the dynamic group matrix of the therapeutic situation and the processes of training and social organization of the therapists. Juan Campos calls the latter the Professional plexus which in turn is moulded by the groups of identification, of pertinence and of reference, the indispensable three groups which sustain the process of training.<\/p>\n

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The Professional plexus<\/p>\n

through participation in groups of identification, pertinence and reference leads from a group identification to a professional identity;<\/p>\n

from an identification with Group\u00a0 Analysis as a theory and practice to the identity as groupanalyst<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n

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The encounter of Juan Campos of Grup d\u2019An\u00e0lisi Barcelona<\/p>\n

and Alfreda Galt of The Lifwynn Foundation is \u201cRain in May\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The chance encounter of Juan Campos in 1988 with the Lifwynn Foundation, Hans Syz and, especially, Alfreda Galt, is \u201c\u00a1Agua in Mayo!\u201d or \u201cRain in May\u201d. Upon writing these texts for the English Content of the Blog, and giving another turn of the screw so to say to some of the texts presented, it becomes as clear as daylight that the step from Identification with Group Analysis as a theory and a practice to the Identity as Groupanalyst can only be made in the context of different groups who recognize each other\u2019s members as groupanalysts. The common threads running through the encounters of Juan Campos with Alfreda Galt, Pat de Mar\u00e9 and the groupanalysts interested in the Study Group of Group Analysis and others weave a transdisciplinary and transnational network in and between these different groups. The present contextualisation is based on the documents and correspondence exchanged between Juan Campos and Alfreda Galt.<\/p>\n

We have in our archives a decade (1988-1998) of intensive correspondence between Juan Campos and Alfreda Galt, both of them groupanalysts por m\u00e1s se\u00f1as<\/i>. The more or less two-hundred interchanges have been scanned and are divided into four stages. As we believe that this historical material could be of interest to groupanalysts, groupworkers and people interested in the groups we live in, we herewith make this correspondence available in this Blog to the English speaking public. We hope it will be helpful in \u201cthe planned endeavour to develop in a group the forces that lead to smoothly running cooperative activity\u201d (Bion, 1943).<\/p>\n

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[1]<\/a> See the five papers on the Professional plexus<\/a> presented in 1989.
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[2]<\/a><\/p>\n