Trigant Burrow

Trigant Burrow (* 7. September 1875 in Norfolk , Virginia; † 24. May 1950 in Westport , Connecticut) was a US -American psychoanalyst , psychiatrist , psychologist , and - in addition to Joseph H. Pratt and Paul Schilder - founder of group analysis . He introduced the term neurodynamics .

life and work

Trigant Burrow was the youngest of four children in a well-off family of French descent. His father was an educated Protestant free spirit, while his mother was a committed Catholic . He studied literature at Fordham University , then medicine at the University of Virginia (MD in 1900), and finally psychology at Johns Hopkins University (Ph.D., 1909). While he was working at the New York State Psychiatric Institute , he was introduced to two European doctors who were on a lecture tour of the United States: Sigmund Freud and Carl Gustav Jung . That same year, Burrow and his family went to Zurich to have Jung analyze them for a year. After his return he practiced as a psychoanalyst in Baltimore until 1926 . In 1911 he was one of the founders of the American Psychoanalytic Association , serving as its president in 1924 and 1925. In 1926 Burrow founded The Lifwynn Foundation for Laboratory Research in Analytic and Social Psychiatry and published his first major work, The Social Basis of Consciousness . Until his death, Burrow worked as the Foundation's research director and devoted himself in particular to the physiological foundations of harmonious and rival relationships within groups and societies, but also between states. His electronic brain measurements and the study of specific eye movements made him the forefather of neuropsychotherapy and trauma therapies such as EMDR .

Founder of group analysis

In 1921 he had himself analyzed by one of his training analysts, Clarence Shields . The student had criticized the authority gradient of the analysis and demanded sincerity from his teacher. Burrow felt it was a shock when he realized "that, in individual application, the analytical attitude and the authoritarian attitude are inseparable." In the exchange of roles between analyst and patient, it finally became clear that both showed blind spots, social conventions and massive defenses. In Trigant Burrow's view, this distortion of analytical work was inevitably due to the two-person analytical relationship. Clarence work and the reduction of neurotic shifts in feeling and perception seemed to him and Clarence Shields only possible in a group constellation. The two asked former patients, relatives and colleagues, including the Swiss psychiatrist Hans Syz , to attend group sessions. Trigant Burrow coined the term group analysis and wrote three basic texts that appeared between 1924 and 1927 in the original language.

Burrow then fell out of favor with Freud. The father of psychoanalysis even described Burrow's texts as “confused drivel” . Freud had institutionalized the treatment on the couch, among other things, because the constant eye contact with an individual patient stressed and irritated him. In a group seated in a circle, however, the analyst was exposed to the direct attention of everyone present. This method of treatment seemed intolerable to Freud. In addition, there was certainly Freud's break with CG Jung in 1913.

Psychoanalysis as a social science

Out of the conviction that psychoanalysis had to be further developed into group analysis, Burrows developed his concept of psychoanalysis as a social science. While the two-person analytical relationship is subjectively arrested and characterized by defense, all participants in the group study the obviously going on emotional processes by exchanging their different perceptions and analytically identifying them consensually. Only in the group - in the plurality of positions - does the truth come to light, so to speak, only in the group can defense mechanisms that are present throughout society become visible.

In terms of cultural theory, too, Burrow found himself in the opposite position to Freud. Because Burrow took the view that humanity had developed away from a state of relative harmony in terms of civilization - towards the struggle of everyone against everyone, with an emphasis on the pairs of opposites right / wrong and good / bad. Burrow wanted to make this destructive interpersonal dynamic perceptible with group analysis and to reduce it, in order to then condense it into phyloanalysis (genre analysis, i.e. "analysis of pathological relationship structures that exist throughout society"). Dieter Sandner has shown in several essays that "two classics of group analysis ", SHFoulkes and Alexander Wolf, took over and implemented essential suggestions from Burrow. The Burrow reception has been increasing since the beginning of the 1990s. Of particular importance are the publications in English by the Italian psychoanalyst Edi Gatti Pertegato, in particular her monograph, written together with Giorgio Orghe Pertegato, on the emergence of group analysis from psychoanalysis in Burrow's work in 2013.

target

Burrows defines the need to devote the work of my life to trying to do what I can to spark the spark necessary to illuminate the nature of abnormal mental states.

Important publications

• The Social Basis of Consciousness. London 1927
• The Structure of Insanity. (A Study in Phylopathology). London 1932

• German: The structure of mental illness: A study in phylopathology. From d. Engl. Transl. by Miriam Bredow. Leipzig: G. Thieme 1933

• The Biology of Human Conflict. New York 1937
• The Neurosis of Man. London 1949
• Science and Man's Behavior. New York 1953
• The Structure of Insanity. The selected letters of Trigant Burrow with biographical notes, New York 1958
• Preconscious Foundations of Human Experiences. New York, London 1964

Basic texts for group analysis

• (1926) The group method in psychoanalysis. Imago 12, 211-222
• (1928) The laboratory method in psychoanalysis, its beginning and its development. Intern. Journal of Psychoanalysis: 14, 375–386
• (1998) The Foundation of Group Analysis, or Analysis of the Responses of Normal and Neurotic People. Lucifer-Amor: 11/21, 104-113

Secondary literature

• Dieter Sandner: The reason for the group analysis by Trigant Burrow. Its importance for modern group analysis . In: Alfred Pritz , Elisabeth Vykoukal (ed.): Gruppenpsychoanalyse. Theory - technology - application . 2nd revised edition. Facultas, Vienna 2003, ISBN 3-85076-578-4 , ( Library Psychotherapy 10), pp. 135-160.
• Dieter Sandner: Trigant Burrow . In: Gerhard Stumm ao: Personal Lexicon of Psychotherapy . Springer, Vienna et al. 2005, ISBN 3-211-83818-X , pp. 79-81.
• Dieter Sandner: Review by Edi Gatti Pertegato: From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis, The Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow. London, Karnac, 2013 In: Group psychotherapy and group dynamics 50, 2014, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, pp. 182-185.
• Edi Gatti Pertegato: Trigant Burrow and Unearthing the Origin of Group Analysis, Group Analysis 32, 1999, pp. 269-284
• Edi Gatti Pertegato, Giorgio Orghe Pertegato: From Psychoanalysis to Group Analysis, the Pioneering Work of Trigant Burrow . London, Karnac, 2013.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} In the original: sincerity. In: Alfreda S. Galt: Trigant Burrow and the Laboratory of the "I". See under web links:
2. ^ ^{A b} Dieter Sandner, Trigant Burrow. In: Stumm / Pritz et al .: Personal Lexicon of Psychotherapy. Vienna, New York 2005, 81
3. ^ The Structure of Insanity. New York 1958, 17

Web links

• Literature by and about Trigant Burrow in the catalog of the German National Library
• The Lifwynn Foundation