The social basis of consciousness: A study in organic psychology based upon a synthetic and societal concept of the neuroses

About this book

"The social basis of consciousness" by Trigant Burrow is a psychological treatise written in the early 20th century. It advances an organismic, societal account of consciousness and the neuroses, arguing that what we call “normality” masks a collective unconscious, and that genuine mental health requires replacing individualistic, authoritarian analysis with shared, organic participation in a broader, relative consciousness.

The opening of this treatise traces the author’s shift from orthodox psychoanalysis to a more inclusive, impersonal approach born of a role-reversal with a student who analyzed him, revealing that analyst and patient alike enact authoritarian, personally biased “resistances.” The Preface frames this as the genesis of group-based experimentation and a rejection of theory-as-authority. The Introduction honors Freud’s insights but contends that psychoanalysis, as commonly practiced, is personalistic suggestion that mistakes theory for life and ignores the societal unconscious; it calls for abrogating the “personal equation” and adopting an organismic, relative standpoint. Chapter I argues that modern “sexuality” is a substitutive symptom distinct from the organic instinct of sex, that normal social adaptation is as neurotic as individual neurosis, and that technique-driven, objective “systems” cannot touch subjective feeling; the analyst must analyze himself, reject normality’s compromises, and meet life directly. Early in Chapter II, the work proposes a “relativity of consciousness,” critiquing the observer’s absolute, image-based (bidimensional) stance and urging tridimensional participation in a common affective life; Chapter III begins extending this relativity principle to individual development.