BURROW, TRIGANT (1875-1950)

A forgotten American psychoanalyst and pioneer of group analysis, Trigant Burrow was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on September 17, 1875, and he died on May 25, 1950, in Westport, Connecticut.

Burrow was the fourth child of John and Anastasia Burrow; his father was Protestant, his mother, a Catholic. His father was a scientifically-minded wholesale pharmacist. At the beginning of his higher education, Burrow attended Fordham University, where the dogmas of the Catholic church began to lose their significance for him. Following his graduation in 1895, he entered the medical school at the University of Virginia, 1899. One year was spent in post-graduate study of biology, one year touring Europe where he attended the psychiatric clinic in Vienna of Professor Wagner-Jarureg. Returning to America he spent three years in the study of experimental psychology, for which he received a PhD in 1909 based on his study of the process of attention. This was a subject that he pursued later in his psychoanalytic career when his interest turned back to physiological processes.

Burrow began to work with the Swiss psychiatrist Adolf Meyer at the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and was introduced to Freud and Jung who were in America for the Clark University Lectures. Burrow was immediately determined to study psychoanalysis and at the age of thirty-four moved with his family to Zurich for a year's analysis with Carl Gustav Jung. This involved considerable financial hardship, but he greatly valued his experience there. This was at the time when Freud and Jung were still closely associated. Burrow was proud of the fact that he was the first American-born person to study psychoanalysis in Europe. In 1910, he returned to Baltimore to work with Meyer at Johns Hopkins University. In 1911, he joined Ernest Jones and others to found the American Psychoanalytic Association (APA).

Between 1911 and 1918, Burrow published eighteen papers on psychoanalysis. His originality is shown in papers written from 1914 onwards. They anticipate much later work in infant development: He writes of the "preconscious" experience of the infant, which remains part of the psyche throughout life. He does not mean Freud's preconscious, that which is accessible to consciousness, but that which is prior to consciousness, when the infant is at one with the mother. For the infant the mother is the infant's love subject, not love object, and the preconscious mode is a feeling that goes out of the infant's primary identification with the mother. In the womb there is a primary physiological unity between infant and mother and a psychological union, a pre-objectless state. These manifest in later life as states of quietude and self-possession. The break in physiological and psychological union with the mother through birth is restored when the infant nourishes at the breast, experiencing a semblance of organic unity, completion and satisfaction. This anticipates much later work, of Margaret Mahler on separate individuation, and Kohut and his self-object theory. Burrow saw resemblances between his ideas and those of Ferenczi.

Burrow's move into group analysis was preceded by his accepting the challenge of one of his analysands, Clarence Shields, to change places with him. Accepting the role of patient, Burrow was immediately impressed with the nature of his own resistances and an appreciation of the social forces at work in the analytic situation. Soon he extended his study to the group situation where he, his colleagues and pupils entered into an intensive study of group processes. Burrow's emphasis was on the analysis of the "here and now": "Group analysis or social analysis is the analysis of the immediate group in the immediate moment." Every member of the group, including the analyst, is both an observer of his own processes and is observed by all the other members of the group. The analyst does not have a privileged position.

Throughout his life Burrow thought of himself as being a psychoanalyst and a Freudian. He believed that he was extending the relational aspects that were already present in Freud and in correspondence tried to persuade Freud of the validity of his work with groups. He failed in this and in 1926 Freud wrote: "As far as the group is concerned an analytic influence is impossible." Some of Burrow's attempts to have his papers published in the Internationale Zeitschrift were blocked by Paul Federn and Sandor Rado.

Burrow saw the "I-persona" that is each individual's self-image as being derived from social influences. From infancy onward, society imposes concepts of what it is to be good and bad and each internalizes these social images and adapts to the demands of society. Thus individuals are divided from the primary organismic unity with society, the world; in group analysis individuals become aware of the strength of the social self-image and can begin to overcome its influence and to reunite with the group as a whole, with the wider society.

Between 1925 and 1928, Burrow published a further thirteen papers, nine of which were given to the APA. He tried to persuade his fellow analysts that the neurotic structures of the individual are replicated in the neurotic structures of society: society is hysterical too, has its own elaborate system of defense mechanisms. He was appointed president of the American Psychoanalytic Society in 1925, but continued his critique of psychoanalysts. "We need to rid ourselves of the idea that the neurotic individual is sick and that the psychopathologists are well. We need to accept a more liberal societal viewpoint that permits us to recognize without protest that the individual neurotic is in many respects not more sick than we ourselves." Burrow insisted that consensual observation is synonymous with scientific method and therefore it is only in the group "laboratory" situation that sexual fantasies, family conflicts, and the social mask become observable. At the annual meeting of the APA in 1925, he said that neurosis is social and that a social neurosis can be met only through a social analysis.

In 1933, when the APA reorganized itself, Burrow was asked to resign his membership. He accepted this with dignity and tried to remain on friendly terms with many of his former colleagues.

In the last phase of his work his interest turned back to the process of attention. Through physiological research and self-observation he described the process by which each individual experiences the tensions of being a member of society: that is, by muscular tension in the ocular and forehead regions, which he called "ditention." Through training it is possible to identify and to give up this process and to experience "cotention," an experience that restores the sense of unity with the social.

Burrow and his followers formed the Lifwynn Institute (Foundation for laboratory research in analytic and social psychiatry) in Westport, Connecticut, which has carried on his work.

Burrow's psychoanalytic and group analytic work anticipated the findings of much later workers. Sigmund Henrich Foulkes, the founder of group analysis, acknowledges his influence, having read his work in 1926. Many of the techniques of group therapy and of the encounter group movement originate from Burrow and his group laboratory. He wrote seven books and seventy articles, and had this comment: "Psychoanalysis is not the study of neurosis: it is a neurosis," but for Freud he was a "muddled bubbler" (letter to Sándor Rádo, September 30, 1925).

Malcolm Pines

See also: Group analysis; Group psychotherapies.

Bibliography

Burrow, Trigant. (1927). The group method of analysis. Psychoanalytic Review, 14, 268-280.

——. (1949). The neurosis of man: An introduction to the science of human behaviour. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.

——. (1958). A search for man's sanity. The selected letters of Trigant Burrow, with biographical notes. New York: Oxford University Press.

Syz, Hans. (1963). Reflections on group or phylo-analysis. Acta Psychotherapeutica et Psychosomatica, 2, 37-55.