TY - BOOK AU - Burrow,Trigant TI - The social basis of consciousness AV - BF PY - 2026/// CY - Salt Lake City, UT PB - Project Gutenberg KW - Consciousness KW - Psychoanalysis KW - Neuroses N1 - Release date is 2026-05-06; Sean (@parchmentglow); Originally published; New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1927 N2 - "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. (This is an automatically generated summary.) UR - https://archive.org/details/socialbasisofcon0000burr/page/n7/mode/2up UR - https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/78616 ER -