1980-1998 From Groupanalysis to Group of Analysis (Grup d’Anàlisi) 4

1988 The Lifwynn Foundation  and Trigant Burrow

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’Análisi Barcelona. As he describes in “Beyond Dichotomy: the orientation of Trigant Burrow”,  in 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. 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 “study group in groupanalysis” that applied to its own social organization and administration the groupanalytic principles executed in its studies of personal and social neurosis. It was what he found most attractive of this group founded by Burrow.

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 to which Juan added in turn his long commentary (1990 Comentario de JCA, Spanish version) which shows his own interests in that work: first of all, the “conspiracies of silence” 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.

Another question of maximum importance, according to Juan, is what concerns the “radically group aspect” of Burrow’s groupanalysis. We have to recognize that Burrow was precursor not only of the group psychotherapies —which he never practiced— but also of the therapeutic communities. For the 1991 Symposium of the SEPTG Hanne Campos prepared a Monographic Bulletin “Therapeutic Community and/or Therapy of the Community” in which the Lifwynn Foundation has the place it merits. As Juan points out in his Commentaries to the paper of Syz: “The 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 “analytic community” the moment  that, in 1925 in the Bad Homburg Congress, they decide to make public their conclusions of the first seven years of investigation with the “group method of analysis”. 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.

The resistances that Juan Campos encounters in his investigations of the: what and how of training —contents and methods— take him to the question of the appropriateness of the contexts —the containers— 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]. There he states that “therapy 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.”  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] 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.

The encounter of Juan Campos of Grup d’Anàlisi Barcelona

and Alfreda Galt of The Lifwynn Foundation is “Rain in May”

The chance encounter of Juan Campos in 1988 with the Lifwynn Foundation, Hans Syz and, especially, Alfreda Galt, is “¡Agua in Mayo!” or “Rain in May”. 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’s members as groupanalysts. The common threads running through the encounters of Juan Campos with Alfreda Galt, Pat de Maré 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.

We have in our archives a decade (1988-1998) of intensive correspondence between Juan Campos and Alfreda Galt, both of them groupanalysts por más señas. 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 “the planned endeavour to develop in a group the forces that lead to smoothly running cooperative activity” (Bion, 1943).

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