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This opus from the pen of Trigant Burrow is “A Study in Organic Psychology Based upon a Synthetic and Societal Concept of the Neuroses.” The book is divided into two parts: “The Philosophy of the Neuroses“and “The Psychology of the Neuroses.” The author has prepared an abstract of each chapter and the book is well arranged.
A chance event, an influence towards an important alteration in the doctor's point of view, is recorded in the preface.“It unexpectedly happened one day … that while I was interpreting a dream of a student—assistant, he made bold to challenge the honesty of my analytic position, insisting that, as far as he was concerned, the test of my sincerity would be met only when I should myself be willing to accept from him the same analytic exactions I was now imposing upon others…. In the interest of experiment … I conceded the arrangement.” From out of the somewhat unpleasant weeks that followed, there emerged the view “that, in its individualistic application, the attitude of the psychoanalyst and the attitude of the authoritarian are inseparable.” The book then takes its origin from this, an eventuality “enforcing the relinquishment of my habitual personalistic basis in psychoanalysis and bringing me to feel the need of a more comprehensive interpretation of the unconscious,” and his six years of “social experimentation upon the discrepancies of an individualistic analysis.” In the introduction we find that the purpose of the essayist is “an attempt to offer a more adequate concept of the essential consciousness of man than,” he feels, “has been attained through the interpretation of the unconscious patterns embodied in the present system of psychoanalysis.” This concept is of an organic psychology of man based upon the emotions and reactions common to society as a unit. It becomes a doctrine of the social organism as a whole; an acknowledged outgrowth of the teachings of Freud.
In “Psychoanalysis in Theory and in Life” (Chapter I, Part I), he states th