Trigant Burrow's Research on Individual and Social Conflict

Abstract

This article is a synthesis of Edi’s presentation at the IAGP Rome Congress in 2009. It explores Burrow’s concept of the individual ‘both single and collective’, which Burrow used in contrast to a theory based on the study of conflict and divisiveness. From the early 1910s to the late 1920s his psychoanalytic and group analytic writings demonstrated a preoccupation with Freud’s formulation. Later his interest in seeking to understand and resolve conflict urged him to involve himself in a systematic exchange of views with several outstanding students from different scientific backgrounds. For Burrow the concepts of ‘social image’, ‘the social unconscious’ and ‘social neurosis’ were key to studying and overcoming the dissociation that he associated with psychopathology and conflict, which are still rampant realities at individual, interpersonal, group and institutional levels as well as in society at large, wars included. For Burrow, in contrast to Freud, the tendency to achieve cooperation is innate and occurs despite conflict and division. He saw both the restoration of the ‘individual as a totality’ and the ‘natural inter-functioning’ between human beings as the primary objectives of group analysis.