PHYLbANALYSIS AND GENERAL SEMANTICS

P HYLOANALYSIS, of which the late Dr. Trigant Burrow was the leading exponent, is a body of psychological theory dealing with the internal universe of behavior, the basic reactions that motivate men’s feelings, thoughts, and actions. Burrow held that it was humanity’s acquisition of language as a tool which caused men to deviate from the biological norm and led them into their present pathological condition of habitual projection and an exacerbated selfconsciousness. Each individual jealously cherishes his own prejudices, his own moral values, as absolute; each looks upon himself as supreme and absolute. In this psychopathological state, the human species has lost its original unitary purpose and its organismic pattern of behavior. No longer reacting organismically, men react in terms of such symbols as ‘right’ and ‘wrong,’ invariably judging each issue in the light of personal preferences and judgments. Organismically, the human race is one; symbolically, however, in terms of ‘I’ and ‘thou,’ ‘we’ and ‘they,’ we are separate. Reliance on the separative symbol has prevented man from responding instinctively as a unified organism. Instincts, displaced from within the organism as a whole, are confined within the cerebral segment, Thus feelings, which have their physiological correlates, are perverted. This, briefly and baldly summarized, is the heart of the phyloanalytic doetrine. It is clear at the start that, though the terminology is somewhat different, it has much in common with general semantics. And yet in his latest work, The Neurosis of ZLf~an, published not long before his death, Trigant Burrow emphatically disassociated himself from the teachings of general semantics. In fact, he went out of his way to stress the shortcomings and errors of the semanticists in their preoccupation with words. The passage is worth quoting in full: