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Psychoanalysis and its various derivatives are intended to be methods of treating the individual patient. The target of Burrow's “phyloanalysis” is mankind, the implication being that the human race as a whole is sick. Though the phyloanalytic doctrine tends to draw from biological sources, the major part of the argument rests on psychological grounds.
There was indeed, according to Burrow, the initial total behavior of the species, or, as he called it, its continuity and solidarity. But man deviated from his original health and security which lay in “the indivisible, organismic interaction between the unitary principle of solidarity within the organism of man and the ordered universe outside him.” How did it happen?
In Burrow's own terms, man made a “faux pas.” Coincident with the emergence of language there has occurred “a false exaggeration, a false self-centering of the individual's personal identity as over against the larger identity we share in common as a race or species.” Where unity and consistency had prevailed, reads another version, there now occurred a splitting, a division and a conflict, “I”, or the self, being now the governing center in the scheme of things. Through this formula Burrow joined those philosophers and moralists, who see in man's self-love (amour-propre) and arrogance the roots of his evil, though Burrow trusted to stay within the limits of natural science. Prejudices and emotional projections, Burrow concluded, are common to the patient and the so-called healthy. Man suffers from a universal neurosis.
Burrow assembled a group of associates, students and patients, and embarked upon intensive daily sessions in group analysis. There emerged in this study the experience of two different patterns of tension. One of these (ditention) was related to man's distorted, prejudiced and self-centered thought and behavior. Through the other (cotention), the organism's original total body tension was recaptured.
Burrow hoped that the re-discovered truly