Grup d´Analisi Barcelona

Pioneers: T. Burrow

Introduction to the life and work of Trigant Burrow

By Hanne Campos

This is a chapter of the unpublished book on “The Group Method of Analysis” dedicated to the foundational pioneer of this method, Trigant Burrow (1875-1950). Once again Juan Campos investigates the sources of psychoanalysis from which groupanalysis is nourished and eventually differentiates itself. The pathway of Trigant Burrow and his relationship with Freud, with the International Association of Psychoanalysis and with his own psychoanalyst, Carl Gustav Jung, presents a wide range of this original and creative context at the beginning of the twentieth century, which not only includes psychoanalysis itself but also the panorama of psychiatry and of mental health at that time in the world at large.

The paper includes and relates the critical moments of the revolutionary experience of the analysis of Trigant Burrow and his analysand Clarence Shields. The elaborations and reflections of Juan Campos in this text arrive until the end of the second decade of last century.

We refer the interested reader to the Web-Page of The Lifwynn Foundation, a groupanalytic community founded by Burrow and his collaborators in 1927 for the development of the group method of analysis. Without doubt this was the first nodal point of a groupanalytic network sustained and promoted by people of the most varied origin, personally as well as professionally.

Apart from the complete works, it is the correspondence the author published on two occasions which of very great interest. In 1948 Burrow met with an inevitable delay in the publication of his “Neurosis of man” —shortness of paper during the postwar years, something which Foulkes encountered this very same year—, so that he used the occasion to establish communication with well-known people in different fields of science, sending chapters of his book previously to its publication. He was working on the publication of this correspondence with the title of “Science and Man’s Behaviour”, when in 1950 a serious illness caused his death. The volume was edited by William E. Galt, an intimate and long-time collaborator of Burrow, and published in 1953 by a publications committee constituted by the nucleus group of the Lifwynn Foundation. The other collection of correspondence, edited and published in 1958 by his collaborators is “A search for Man’s Sanity. The selected letters of Trigant Burrow, with biographical notes”. Both books are of unsurpassable value in the approximation to the thought and work of the author.

It should be added that the complete published works are part of the personal library of Juan Campos, who from 1988 onwards established and maintained personal contact and correspondence with the colleagues of the Lifwynn Foundation, particularly with two persons then still alive of the original group and successively the last two presidents of the Foundation, Hans C. Syz and Alfreda S. Galt.

You will also find included a short paper by Juan Campos presented in the XI Congress of the IAGP, a general bibliography, the psychoanalytic bibliography of Trigant Burrow’s, the evolution of the definition of group analysis in the work of Burrow and the progressive aproximation of the concept of group analysis as “Participative Investigation of Social Self Inquiry”.

Works of Trigant Burrow in this blog:

  • T. Burrow (1932). The estructure of insanity. A study in Phylopathology. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., Ltd.  T. Burrow (1992). “La estructura de la locura. Un estudio en filopatología”. Traducido al castellano por Gd’AB y editado en Barcelona por Plexus Edito(e)s.