For a new generation of neurotics (psychotherapists included), psychologist Arthur Janov recycles his famous psychophysiological cure-all for mental illness: primal therapy, widely known as scream therapy.
He sticks to his original premise that pain experienced from unfulfilled needs produces an unreal, unfeeling self constantly at war with the real self.
However, he now claims his theory has been validated by scientific studies in the fields of immunology, weeping, cancer, and brain science.
Janov blends case studies with exposition on repression, imprinting, birth trauma, the difference between "normal" and "neurotic," and a discussion on bogus primal therapists.
Along the was he disparages New Age rebirthers and most conventional therapies. Controversial remarks abound, such as, "Optimism . . . may only be a good defense."
There's even an oblique reference to the cause of sudden infant death when Janov describes how the terror of being in a dark room alone can trigger earlier birth trauma.
Twenty years later, he's still revolutionary, articulate, and maybe right.
Janov's theory was that we are all creatures of need -- the need to group and develop at our own pace, to be held and caressed, to be stimulated, to be kept comfortable, to be fed, and to be allowed to be oneself.
Janov considers these needs the "central reality of the infant." An infant has no way of fulfilling these needs himself; when they are not met he is left feeling helpless, frightened, unprotected, and unloved.
These feelings, too, become a basis for how the adult perceives himself and the world.
Janov uses need, pain, and tension interchangeably, since unmet needs results in pain and tension. An infant has only certain basic responses to this pain. When the pain becomes too great, one of these protective responses is what is referred to as a "splitting off."
When this happens, however, it is not only the pain which is shut off, but other feelings as well; and, most importantly, the individual's total consciousness of himself.
Additionally, this splitting off results in the individual harboring the pain throughout his life. The individual becomes unreal because he has had to shut off what is essential to him -- his own self.
One can never have now what one did not get then. But the neurotic struggle is to keep trying.
And the result of the struggle is much unhappiness, anxiety, anger, and tension which we see far too often in our patients, ourselves, and in the people with whom we are close.
Physical expression of feelings is necessary because we won't believe that there is a true separation of the mind and body.
Feelings are an actual happening in the body -- chemical and hormonal. If this were not so a lie detector test would be useless.
When the body experiences any kind of central nervous system impulsive the natural and automatic response of the body is to express this through the neuromuscular system.
This involves movement and sound. For example, we have several patients who are asthmatic. When they begin to talk in a session about a situation that is emotionally loaded their asthma often recurs.
The patient is encouraged to allow the asthmatic symptoms to happen and to attend to it as much as he can tolerate. As he drops into this body experience, he feels the immense pain of having his supply of oxygen depleted.
In time, these patients realize that during the asthmatic attack they are reliving an earlier event when their oxygen actually was momentarily shut off.
This horrible physical insult and trauma originated when they were so small, helpless, and fragile that they could do nothing about it.
In all cases their primal trauma occurred in the womb. The agony of this moment is expressed with desperate gasping sounds and physical struggle.
This type of expression is as natural as when one's finger touches a hot stove. Upon burning a finger the normal reaction is to quickly withdraw the finger and make some kind of exclamation.
Unless someone is totally shut down he does not stand still and say nothing when he is physically hurt.
The physical primal pain that is laid down in the body is repressed and controlled. Children growing up in certain cultures are taught this from the very beginning.
Unfortunately, such control induces the feelings to find other means of expression -- as in asthma or anxiety.
When the body is allowed full expression of feelings it does not need to utilize neurotic or psychosomatic outlets for its pain.
Anxiety: The Lowest Common Denominator
Probably the most common denominator to all psychiatric problems is anxiety.
Anxiety has been described as a feeling of dread or of impending danger; it is usually accompanied by many physical symptoms such as increase in heart rate, sweating, shaking, flushing, pallor, diarrhea, constipation, shortness of breath, confusion, difficulty in concentration, hyperventilation, and many, many others.
Lately many psychiatric professionals do not differentiate between fear and anxiety. Freud considered anxiety to be inherent in human beings.
He developed his theory of healthy and neurotic defenses assuming that defenses are needed to guard against anxiety and considered some more functional than others.
Although he may have asked himself why he thought anxiety must be basic to the human condition, he did not seem to take this question very far.
Primal has advanced the question, Janov's concept of need and pain has evolved and been taken back further to prenatal existence.
What we have always considered to be a fairly uneventful state in terms of the effect on one's later life -- the first nine months -- is actually the most significant time in a human being's development, forming the rudimentary structure of his later existence.
The womb is thought to be a pleasant and secure place where all of one's needs are taken care of; for many of us this is a myth.
Our fetal existence in the womb was barely an existence at all; instead, it was a continuous struggle to stay alive.
At this time in development, needs are exclusively physical -- the need for oxygen, nutrition, fluids, growth, proper temperature, balanced hormonal, endocrine, and enzyme supply, genetic strength, and many others. Without these essentials the fetus would die.
However, the fetus can survive under very minimal conditions - those which are extremely depriving and yet not totally void:
Hypothetically assume that an embryo needs an environmental temperature in the range of say, 96 degrees F to 102 degrees F and that going to as high as 104 degrees F would bring on his death.
Then imagine the embryo's environmental temperature is 103.999999 degrees F. The embryo, because of its own inner strength and instinct for life, manages to hang on and survive - though at most times on the threshold of death and in excruciating pain. What would that embryo be like once grown?
Depending on his strengths and traumas, he would respond to this memory laid down in his nervous system in a way somehow representative of this early feeling.
Perhaps he would become a war hero constantly confronting death or a physician attempting to save other lives when it is really his own near-death that terrifies and drives him.
Perhaps he would become a reclusive fearful of leaving his home, imagining threats everywhere, or even catatonic, with his body posturing the death-like feelings inside him.
Possibly he would struggle with suicide throughout his life like Ernest Hemingway -- a holding a gun in his mouth every morning for years before finally pulling the trigger.
The explanation we have for this is that in the embryo or fetus the lower brain functions and the spinal cord are more developed that the higher brain centers, i.e.., the cerebral cortex.
This is adaptive in that the fetus can react to stress and trauma in order to survive. Yet he does not have a fully-developed cerebral cortex and thus cannot know in the adult sense what is happening to him.
If the womb environment is extremely depriving and stressful, the fetus can only experience life as dangerous.
He has limited reactions to danger -- neuromuscular, autonomic, chemical -- all of them physical and a function of the primitive and lower brain. As he learns to respond to stress in this way it forms the structure of his later life, so that any later stress will evoke these early feelings.
In other words, he learns to respond to stress with severe autonomic reactions such as panic or shock. This can revert in an adult to what we call anxiety or depression.
If these feelings are not felt, they are acted out. If felt but unconnected and unknown to the individual, they result in a great deal of suffering in life.
Extremely painful circumstances that are a part of prenatal existence and birth are not remembered consciously because, as the cerebral cortex is forming, this part of the brain is capable of repressing and symbolizing the pain recorded in the lower brain.
If, in addition, life is painful in childhood, the entire central nervous system becomes overloaded.
The cortex does what it can to shut off as much of the pain as possible while still enabling the person to function. People develop the best defenses they are capable of in order to live.
Unfortunately, when a great deal of brain activity is needed for repression or if the nervous system is extremely overloaded with pain, the individual's responses to life situations are both limited and stereotyped.
In some, the repressive activity is successful in holding the pain below the level of awareness, but at the cost of deadening their lives.
Others, unable to repress the agony within, act out in a more impulsive and bizarre fashion; these we more easily label crazy or psychotic.
Because the nine months prior to birth have always been a mystery to human beings, no one has ever been able to help children or adults with this early derived pain.
When a person's birth feelings are triggered as a child, parents do not know what is going on. Our culture is so anti-feeling that children are expected or forced to shut off their feelings.
They lose the opportunity to let their feelings out, to connect them, to place them in some kind of perspective within their lives -- and, to add further injury, the child, in feeling the disapproval of his parents begins to feel the same negative reactions to his own pain.
This is in effect labeling the very thing that is real and true about the person and his life "bad."
Hence we see the adult not only suffering with anxiety, depression, or inappropriate behavior he cannot seem to control, but hating himself because of it.
There is then further shutting down of his real self and stronger reinforcement of crazy and defensive behavior. More...
