The
Role of Social Images in Conflict
and
Pathology of “Normality”
Edi
Gatti Pertegato and Giorgio Orghe Pertegato
Presented
at the 84th Anniversary Conference of the Lifwynn Foundation
C.
G. Jung Foundation,
New York City
October 29-31, 2010
ABSTRACT
Trigant Burrow’s concept of “social
images” is strictly correlated to individual and social conflict and to the
pathology of “normality”, conceived as a social neurosis. From the
beginning of his psychoanalytic practice he questioned Freud's instinct theory
by stating the social nature of man and the interrelational nature of conflict,
coming to assign a primary role to “social images”, which, in substituting
for the individual and community reality, affect the unity of man and between
men. Their overcoming, even hindered by the "parallelism with
dream images”, is made possible by the “analysis of the group by the
group” Burrow himself introduced.
CONTENTS
1. Is conflict an unsolvable problem?
2. Social
images as a substitute for reality
Bibliography
1.
Is conflict an unsolvable problem?
This
paper deals with the deepening of a basic aspect closely connected with
individual and social conflict, division and psychopathology, namely, the origin
and nature of “social images” whose role is crucial and may be expressed in
manifold facets. Conflict represents a most crucial and topical issue. In
reality, despite the many attempts to study and face conflict, we can’t avoid
to see how more and more it has been growing and bursting out during the last
century and how it is still widespread and rampant in our time at every level,
in interpersonal and family relationships, in groups, society, institutions and
nations. Already over seven decades
ago, Clarence Shields (1937), in the preface of Trigant Burrow’s book The
Biology of Human Conflict, in observing that conflict through the ages has
become so increasingly insistent that “it is now definitely a major
problem,” outlines a very disappointing situation about the possibility of its
overcoming:
“But
man, despite his marked ability to meet difficult situations, does not seem to
comprehend, to encompass this particular problem of conflict within himself. It
is there. We talk about it. We all know it, but we don’t seem to go forward to
meet it - not as a unit. It is present both in war times and peace times,
in commerce, the industries and the professions; it is indicated in crime, in
insanity and in normality - in the behaviour of all of us. And yet we seem only
to stand around and look in each other’s faces. (p. 8; my italics)
To
Freud himself conflict, although it was the central notion of the theory of
neuroses based on opposing forces or principles, constituted an enigma. In “Reflections on War and Death” he points out very significantly
the problem of man's interrelation discord and conflict by writing:
“Why
it is that even in time of peace every nation and all the individuals within a
nation should disdain, hate and abhor one another is indeed a mystery. I
simply cannot understand it” (Freud,
1915, in
Burrow, 1949).
Are
we then in a dead end, and should we conclude that we are helpless in meeting
conflict in its own real nature and implications?
Thus, have we no choice than viewing it as intrinsic to the human beings,
or is there a way out?
Well,
there is a “giant figure,” as Nathan Ackerman (1964) called Trigant Burrow,
who caught the “vast sickness of human relations” and “struggled his
entire life to understand that worst of plagues – man against man.” (p.(vi)
It’s
highly surprising that Burrow’s great contribution on conflict is so
overlooked, when not wholly ignored in the psychoanalytic and group analytic
fields. Shields informs us that Burrow, through his investigations, endeavoured
“to outline this problem and a method for knowing it.” (p. viii)
Indeed, conflict constituted the focus of Burrow’s lifelong group
analytic researches with various groups and an experimental community, which
were viewed as a cross section of society at large.
Contrary
to Freud, who ascribed conflict to the instincts’
vicissitudes, that is, as pertaining to the individual as a monad, Burrow
viewed the individual as a unit within the human species.
He conceived of the individual’s origin as interrelational,
namely, closely connected to the individual relationships with a distorted
familial, community, and social environment, starting from the primary one,
represented by the parents. (E.Gatti
Pertegato, 2009a)
He
came to establish that cooperation is primary in respect to conflict and
division (1926), introduced the concept of a “social instinct” and assigned
a leading role to “social images” in obscuring this basic bond and inducing
conflict and dissociation. (1928c).
Since
his early discovery of the “social image,” and the “social basis” of the
neurosis, step by step, he came to realize that “man embodies the basis of
knowing it,” and elaborated a method for grasping it in its unity and
complexity; that is by considering a human as a whole in interaction with
his/her environment. As there was no guide, no precedent, this took place
gradually during sixteen years of group experimentations and each step was taken
as a result of such investigation, whose direction was dictated by the material
observed, namely human material. (C. Shields, 1937)
Let’s
hear Burrow himself (1937, p.16):
“In
these studies I have attempted to formulate certain aspects of the altered
adjustments in the sphere of feeling and thinking that took place within and
among my associates and myself as a result of this daily living experimentation
in the organism total reactions”.
2.
Social images as a substitute for reality
“Social
images,” “social unconscious” and “mirroring” are key-concepts in the
study of conflict. They were introduced for the first time by Trigant Burrow in
1924 in
his extraordinary paper Social images versus Reality” and will acquire more and more
relevance in his approach to group researches.
Burrow was a prolific author but, being dissatisfied of the
individualistic conception of psychoanalysis, challenged by his analysand
Clarence Shields, who will become his main collaborator, in 1918 gave up his
psychoanalytic practice and stopped writing, in order to study man’s behaviour
and his disorders, first in a mutual analysis and then in a group setting (E.Gatti
Pertegato, 2009b). Burrow’s paper Social
Images Versus Reality is the break of his six years silence, from 1918 to
1924, entirely dedicated to group experimentations, and represent the first
theoretical paper on group analysis. A torrent stream of many papers followed
with the report of the enriching outcomes, which emerged from his group analytic
researches. In this first paper, “social images,” their origin, nature and
overcoming are faced in the light of the application of Einstein’s theory of
relativity to the mental sphere which alone takes into account man’s social
environment, and stresses the necessity to forego the “absolute basis of
evaluations residing in the private judgement of the individual” in favour of
the adoption of “a basis which
being relative to and inclusive of our mental
and social processes will envisage both on the basis of a more universal and
encompassing evaluation.” (p.235).
Here,
we also meet with the implicit formulation of the transgenerational-transpersonal
processes and of the existence of the social mind in the individual, the current
“internal groups.” What does
Burrow means by “social images”? He refers to images of the social mind,
such as systems of values, attitudes, behaviour and moods which are currently
and unquestionably accepted as “normal” into society, but which do not
reflect both the individual and the community’s reality. (E. Gatti Pertegato,
G.O.Pertegato, 2006). In spite of this, they generally characterize the so
called “normality”, which in Burrow’s view is but a shared illness and for
which he coined the concept of “social neurosis”, because of the pervasive
tendency “to enact a given role, to portray a certain character or part”
(Burrow, 1928a, p. 199) to the detriment of
one’s own true self and cooperation.
What
is the nature of social images? From an inclusive or relative analysis, there is
a parallelism between social images and dream images, as “these mental
pictures within the social mind present the same mechanism that actuates the
dream images within the individual mind” : they have “the same tendency of
substitution, symbolism and indirection” that “underlie the dream.” Either
the unconscious of the individual or the social unconscious show a
correspondence in their psychic manifestations: they show the same “hidden,
furtive, self-protecting nature of all unconscious processes, individual and
social,” so that man “is now unconsciously occupied almost entirely with his
own image and its reflections”, including
the tendency to avoid every approach to self-disclosure (Burrow, 1924,
p.231-232). Burrow states:
“Such images constituting our social
self-reflections present a myriad of facets. We rise from the sleep images of
our individual unconscious only to enter the no less unconscious reflections of
our social mind in its waking activities” (p.232). As a consequence, “in
his social relationships the individual sees himself in the light in
which these relationships reflect him. All of them give back his personal image
in the social mirror they present to him.”
Thus,
the individual, in a sort of role-playing, is unconsciously induced to assume
various role models, so that “the so-called social
consciousness becomes but an unconscious exchange” of arbitrary social
images (p.232).
“The more we consider this self-reflective tendency,
the more we may realize how readily we fall into the adoption of this, that, or
the other characterological role in response to the image that is unconsciously
being played opposite us.” (p.232)
How
does this happen? And what is the origin of social image’s? The results of
experimentation in group analysis show that personal and social images,
individual and social unconscious, are strictly correlated in a circularity:
society-individual-society. The
individual’s unconscious is “foddered” by social images coming from the
social unconscious, to which in turn the individual himself accedes. Ultimately,
social images replace the individual and community’s true reality, causing
dissociation, alienation, conflict and division, giving rise to the
“I”-Persona”, that is a false personality. Lloyd Gilden (1999) describes
in detail the phases and the modalities in which the personality’s split turns
into the “I”-Persona, a mask which replaces the individual’s true reality.
The
origin of social image’s is traceable to the mother-image, but it does not
reflect the mother’s personality; rather it is the image of the social setting
around her. The “child automatically replaces the biological reality of the
parent-organism with the social image that is artificially reflected to
him by the parent”. (p. 233)
According
to Burrow, “much of the confusion of psychoanalysis” is due to the failure
to make a distinction between the mother-image and the mother’s personality.
The mother-image and the community-image have “the same underlying
psychology,” thus, as the mother-image “bears no relation whatever” with
the mother’s reality (p.233), so the social image has no correspondence
with the reality of the social organism. Burrow argues that such a
conclusion “deals a stunning blow to our social as well to our personal
prepossessions. It means that we shall reckon altogether anew with the
unconscious factor that is of central importance in psychoanalysis – the
factor of the mother-complex – and that […] we shall have to alter the very
foundations of its present interpretation, individual and social.” (p.234)
That’s
the direction Burrow took by challenging the neurosis of humanity and mental
disorder “in its social as well in its individual intrenchments,” in which
social images play as crucial role. The means to recognize and overcome this
“fetish of our social image-worship” resides only in a relative or inclusive
“analysis of the social mind as it exists within each of us”(p.235), that
is, through the “analysis of the group by the group,” a process Burrow
introduced. He states that “it is the images of common interchange sponsored
by the social medium that represent the material to be analyzed.” (Burrow,
1928b p. 6); but he calls our attention to the fact that “the social medium is
represented quite as completely in the single individual as in a group of
individuals, precisely as the instinctive group principle of man is embodied
as fully in the single
individual as in the group.” (p. 6)
However,
Burrow warns that it’s not an easy task, as social images exert a powerful
influence, being felt “as something good and desirable” and are not
suspected “as pathological and
extraneous to the essential organism of man” (Burrow, 1928c; E. Gatti
Pertegato, G.O. Pertegato, 2006, p. 130)
In
conclusion, although they exert an unconscious deep appeal, Burrow (1924) points
out that “vicarious images, however much they enjoy the protection of social
convention, are still vicarious images. However general their acceptance by the
current and institutionalized mind they are none the less impediments to consciousness and growth.” (p. 235, our italics).
In fact, group analytic experience shows that these images clash with the
individual and community’s reality. There
is a sort of expropriation of one’s authentic nature at the root of
dissatisfaction, discontent, conflict and pseudo-normality, which give rise to
social neuroses and mental disorders. The object of Group Analysis, then, is
“to enable the individual to express himself as he is – as he himself thinks
and feels when utterly divorced from and unsupported by this social image of
himself.” (Burrow, 1928a,. In
other words, Group Analysis affords the means to free one’s own creativity by
the restoration of the “individual’s unity” and of the “natural
inter-functioning” between human beings.
_________________
Bibliography
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N. (1964), “Foreword”, in Burrow T. (1964), The Preconscious Foundations of
Human Experience, ed. W. Galt, New York, Basic Books.
Burrow
T. (1924) “Social Images versus Reality”, The
Journal of Abnormal Psychology and Social Psychology, vol. XIX, 3: 198-206;
translated in Burrow T.(2009).
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Psychoanalysis: its Inception and Development”,
American Journal of Psychiatry,
vol.5, 3: 345-355; translated in Burrow
T.(2009).
Burrow
T. (1928a), “The Basis of Group Analysis, or the Analysis of the Reactions of
Normal
and Neurotic Individuals”, The British
Journal of Medical Psychology, vol.8: 198-206; translated in
Burrow T.(2009).
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T. (1928b), “Elements of Group Analysis”. Unpublished.
Manuscript
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Analysis”, Psyche, vol.VIII, 3:
1-16; translated in Burrow
T.(2009).
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T. (1937) The Biology of Human Conflict. An Anatomy of Behavior Individual
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: The Macmillan Co.
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: Routledge and Kegan Paul;
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Torino
, quoted in Burrow T. (1949).
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Pertegato E. (1999) “Trigant Burrow and Unearthing he Origin of Group
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