In researching the history and background of this book I found a lot of conflicting accounts describing Primal Therapy. The Wikipedia page on Primal Therapy notes that the technique is discredited and provides multiple links to books and articles that criticize the method and an overview of some of the most commonly cited problems with Primal Therapy. A YouTube search produces a variety of results, including people mocking the method, like Gumball's Primal Scream moment or Quiet Primal Scream. You can also find people who seem to be taking the method seriously, although they don't seem to be following the details that Dr. Janov describes in his book.
The people who misinterpret or make fun of Dr. Janov's method typically reduce it to a statement like; "you have pain, you need to get it out, you can do that by tearing at your hair and screaming in the woods". This is a really unfair reduction of Dr. Janov's ideas. Probably the best YouTube link I found is a 3 minute summary of the method provided by Dr. Arthur Janov himself.
Dr. Arthur Janov is a rather amazing individual. He is 92 years old and from what can be gathered he still writes books, provides interviews, keeps a detailed and popular blog, and continues to practice his method at the Janov Primal Center which lists him as the director. From his interview he says:
"We have needs that we are all born with, when those needs aren't met we hurt. When that hurt is big enough it is imprinted on our system, and it changes our whole physiological system. What our therapy does is go back to that early brain and relive the pain and get it out of the system. Meanwhile that pain has been held in storage, just waiting for its exit. So Primal Therapy is a way to access our feeling brain, and down below to our brain stem to all the hurts in our lives and bring them up into consciousness for connection and integration. ... What Primal Therapy is doing is different, instead of pushing back feelings with tranquilizers and drugs we let the feelings come up. Instead of tranquilizing feelings we are liberating them. Most of psychotherapy is talk therapy, or insight therapy, or therapy with words and Primal Therapy has found that it is not words necessarily that we need to go to. We need to talk to a brain that doesn't talk, that feels, and we have found a way to go to that brain and talk to it in feeling terms and let it communicate itself to the therapist."
If you are reading this page to learn something about Recovery you may be wondering why I'm interested in Primal Therapy given my biases against the method and that as far as I can tell Primal Therapy is not a generally accepted form of treatment.
In Recovery we say "Express your feelings. Suppress your temper". A lot of new attendees focus on the statement calling for suppression and become concerned that we are just trying to get people to stop acting as though they are unwell without actually considering their internal emotional landscape. That is in fact exactly what Dr. Janov's criticism was of psychotherapy methods when he wrote his book.
Dr. Janov's ideas are intuitively appealing. He wrote his book in the 1970s and I think it very much reflects that time when popular culture was realizing the problems with conformity, the need for self expression and the importance of not repressing feelings. John Lennon was famously one of the early advocates of Primal Therapy. The following image is from a book auction where a copy of The Primal Scream signed by John Lennon sold for over $7,000.
The idea that we need to express our feelings in order to resolve them is definitely a potent one. The notion that suppression leads to neurosis is central to Dr. Janov's thinking and it is something that I think we can all agree on. Dr. Janov explains that neurotic behaviour is the result of unsatisfied childhood needs. Those early unmet needs are in some cases inexpressible because the resulting pain may have manifested at a time when the patient was too young to understand their circumstances and they did not have labels for their experiences. In response they developed symbolic neurotic behaviours to avoid or suppress the pain.
Dr. Janov argues that neurotic behaviours are maladaptive because they seek to address needs that can't be directly satisfied. For example, the pain and suffering that a person experienced during their early development because they didn't receive sufficient encouragement from their father, in adult life might translate into an egocentric individual. That individual might crave public recognition and spend all of their energies in pursuit of notoriety regardless of the cost to their lives. The pain that was caused by the neglectful parent is suppressed or ignored, and the symbolic neurotic behavior is exhibited as a way to feed a need that represents the child's need for love and acceptance. Notoreity however will never be an adequate replacement for a father's support and affection and so the individual suffers because they don't understand why the thing they think they want is so unsatisfying.
The Primal experience is the key that Dr. Janov's therapy provides. By re-experiencing pain from the past the therapist is able to help the patient integrate their real or original selves with their neurotic or constructed self. The reintegrated person is able to accept themselves, is healthier, and free of symptoms like anxiety and depression.
Dr. Janov argues that talk therapy addresses the thinking part of our brain, and that too much reasoning is another route to suppression. This point in particular is a really important one and one to take seriously if you are spending time trying to learn something about Cognitive Behavioural Therapies. Are CBT methods just a fancy route to emotional suppression?
At a recent meeting we were discussing the Recovery method and how it is often the case that when we are angry or fearful, those feelings can be traced back to false beliefs, and that through changing our beliefs we can become less fearful. One of our new members put up their hand and said, "Yes, but I just feel extreme anxiety, I'm not thinking about anything when I'm having a panic attack, I'm just in panic". What he was expressing was very much Dr. Janov's notion of the Primal feeling brain that is just experiencing pain outside of any rational mode.
We emphasize several ideas at Recovery meetings. One idea we often state is that "You are entitled to your initial response". In Recovery terms this is meant to acknowledge that whatever you feel in response to a situation is your feeling and it is valid and okay. If you feel frightened or anxious at a bus stop, for example you are worried that you may not understand the bus schedule, or you may have no idea why you are worried, that is okay. Accept that you have that feeling. One major departure from classical therapy that we take in Recovery meetings is that, unlike Dr. Janov, we are not therapists, and so we don't diagnose one another. We don't try to investigate why you have your initial response, and practically as a peer support group, we don't have the tools to investigate the root cause of your response.
That isn't to say that such an investigation isn't worthwhile. It may be valuable for you to understand the causes of your fears, or your anger, and if you have access to a therapist they may be able to help you investigate those details by talking to you about your personal history.
Our focus in Recovery meetings is helping each other to respond in an average and realistic way. While we always accept our initial internal response to a situation whatever that may be, the Recovery method tells us to ignore our impulses and our temper, and to express our feelings instead. Given the previous example of worrying about public transportation, we would say that castigating yourself because you feel shame about being worried in public is an example of fearful temper and is something that you should not engage in. It is okay that you are worried, it is even okay that you have an impulse to curse or deride yourself, it isn't okay to act on your impulse by beating yourself up about it.
Beating yourself up might involve thinking a lot of self critical things, or telling the person beside you that you are a dummy for not being able to understand the schedule. The problem with following through with an impulse to deride yourself is that this will intensify your symptoms and lead you into greater fear, panic, and anxiety. In Recovery we emphasize that bad habits, like self castigation, will lead to internal mental noise and chaos, in Recovery terminology we call this "The Imagination on Fire". This negative state can result when we allow our mind to run wild and feed our fears through the induction of vicious cycles by expressing temperamental responses to situations.
You can reasonably express your feeling, which might take the form of asking the person beside you when they think the bus will arrive, and even saying that perhaps you don't understand the schedule or are worried that you may have missed the bus. This is a realistic response to the situation, you may find it unpleasant if you don't like talking to strangers, but making a decision and taking some simple action often has a calming effect.
In Recovery we make improvements by taking small steps and working on simple situations that give us trouble. We aren't engaged in a subterranean exploration of the dark corners of our subconscious. There is nothing deeply intellectual, or impressively romantic about the Recovery method. All we are doing is accepting who we are, and working in a realistic and practical way towards a peaceful life, one simple situation at a time.
If you'd like to join us meetings are always open to new attendees.
More Information
Meetings: Activities and Key Concepts
Fear is the Mind Killer
