Links Conferences Publications and
Articles Group Analysis/Social
Self-Inquiry Montague
Ullman Varieties of
Conscious Experience
Lifwynn
Correspondence
Follow Your Bliss
Contacts
Toward
Social
Sanity
This website is dedicated to the work of Trigant Burrow and his followers, who were members of The Lifwynn Foundation.
The
foundation was
established in 1927 by Burrow and was the setting for an on-going
experimental
community of inquiry into the nature of what Burrow called the "Social
Neurosis. To Burrow, our problems are
not individual but collective. We
are an organism that has fallen ill.
Burrow
was an early
American psychoanalyst who introduced group analysis in
the
nineteen-twenties Group analysis was
forerunner of group therapy
and other group approaches. It is also called Social
Self-Inquiry (see link above).
It was
also a scientific investigation of the causes of human conflict and
alienation
in which the feelings and motivations of the investigators provided
the material to be
investigated. Burrow and his co-workers recognized that the societal
pathology
they were examining was embodied in themselves as individuals and
as a group. They developed the ability to
observe the disorder within their
owninterrelational processes, and find a healing response within the
observation itself.
In
1926 Burrow founded the Lifwynn Foundation for
Laboratory Research in
Analytic and Social Psychiatry and published his first major
work, The
Social Basis of Consciousness. Until his death Burrow acted
as the research
director for the foundation and devoted particular attention to the
physiological substructures of harmonious and rivaling participants
within
groups and societies, but also between states. His methods for
measuring the
electrical activity of the brain in connection with specific eye
movements has
led some to call him the father
of neuropsychotherapy and trauma
therapy.
Recently,
The Lifwynn Foundation was terminated.
Over
the last decade, the TLF Board of
Directors became a small, dispersed global network, occasionally
organizing
collaborative conferences informed by the research tradition developed
by
Trigant Burrow. A
model for this sort of
research was a 1990 four-day experiential inquiry into addiction as a
socio-cultural phenomenon. Many
other
research topics have been explored over the years.
Our
Board met regularly through conference
calls and email correspondence to continue the process Burrow called
“Social
Self Inquiry.” For
us, this work
increasingly involved studying the impact of cybernetic consciousness
upon our
own organization. We
have become one
world through technological revolution, and this has been a factor in
the
fragmentation of social reality into warring fundamentalisms.
Projections of
the “other” dominate an aggressive and divisive global consciousness.
We
considered ourselves to be part of this process.
Over
the last several years it became clear
to us that maintaining the traditional structure and Bylaws of TLF in
the
digital age was no longer viable.
Though
we attempted to reform our Bylaws, we concluded that under the
circumstances we
were no longer able to conduct the sort of research Burrow practiced
which
depended on regular experience of face-to-face community. And so we
have
disbanded TLF.
This
website will continue, however, as an
historical record of TLF activities, its members’ writings, and other
efforts
to carry forward Burrow’s profound contributions to our understanding
of human
neurosis, and how to achieve social sanity.