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The Death of Psychotherapy (2000)
Donald A. Eisner
“Primal Therapy rests on a fundamental and primary fiction, namely, that undergoing Primal Therapy and experiencing primals will alleviate one’s pain and produce therapeutic change…
There is emotional tyranny in that the patients are made to feel they don’t know much “by therapists eager to anchor all of a patient’s utterances securely in the infantile past.” Patients in this type of therapy regress, and are made dependent on the therapist, may suffer a loss of self-esteem and feel diminished,
Furthermore, based on the excessive cost for the short term therapy in particular, a patient may simply convince him or herself that the new person is the way he or she wants to be. So Primal Therapy leaves some people in a worse condition than when they began.
Since there is no psychological testing, psychodiagnosis or formal follow-up, it is difficult to know what types of patients might be helped. It may be counterproductive for patients with poor reality testing and “defective egos” to undergo Primal Therapy. …If it is Janov’s position that any patient can be cured, his recent publications should be regarded as anecdotal and closer to fiction than science…
Since there is no relevant research, Primal Therapy could simply be chalked up as a placebo and the excessive demand characteristics of the extreme rituals and procedures as well as group pressures. But why should a person endure such intense and perhaps phony reliving of experiences when there may be less onerous and perhaps more effective techniques? For example, as shown by the NIMH study described in Chapter 6, cognitive behavior therapy, both with and without medication, apparently reduces depression in about 16 weeks.”
The Death of Psychotherapy: From Freud to Alien Abductions. Donald A.
Eisner (p.51-52) (2000) ISBN 0275964132
