Lets Talk About Me 1981 Clare
Let’s Talk About Me. (1981)
A Critical Examination of the New Psychotherapies
by Dr Anthony W. Clare with Sally Thompson
“Janov himself claims to be a pioneer of mental exploration and believes that his discovery of the existence of ‘primal pain’ ranks with Freud’s discovery of the unconscious…Janov is engagingly dismissive. ‘Until the Pain is felt’. He observes, characteristically spelling the portentous word with a capital P, ‘any one thing will be as ineffective as another’…The way to feel the Pain is through Primal therapy.” p.111
“It does appear that the need to cling to a simple, unqualified, dogmatic theory outweighs whatever critical awareness that Janov’s readers possess. Of course it may be that critical awareness is the one quality that they do not possess, particularly when it comes to evaluating the pot-pourri of potted physiology, speculative behavioral theory and scraps of child psychology which Janov puts together.” p.121
“What changed Janov was a sound-’an eerie scream welling up from the depths of a young man on the floor during a therapy session.’…Janov put together his explanatory theory. The scream he saw as ‘the product of central and universal pains that reside in all neurotics’….Janov elsewhere makes little effort to conceal, namely that by definition we are all ‘neurotic’, we are all locked into out primal pain pool and we are all accordingly sick.” p.112
“Janov’s theory makes no secret of who are the villains of the piece – parents…Each case history testifies to the central tenet of the theory; neurosis is pain and pain results from unmet infantile needs…separation of self from need produces a split which then bedevils the individual throughout his life…Janov’s examples of adult neurosis reflecting infantile trauma can be traced directly back to Freud’s theories concerning infant psychological development” p.113
“During the three week intensive course, the therapist will guide him back to the origins of the pain that he has come to experience. To become whole again declares Janov. it is necessary to feel the split and ’scream out’ the connection that will unify the person once more. The prize, therefore, held out to the participant who has come to LA clutching his dollars and bereft of family, friends or anyone to call an acquaintance, is the primal, defined by Janov as the experience of the pain. But it takes time, which in this paragon of brief therapies, means a couple of days. Before that there are pre-Primals…” p. 115
“Everything is taken as evidence of this truth [of Janov's Pain theory]. Stuttering is a ‘graphic example’ of the conflict between the real self, suppressed through traumatic experiences, and the false, defense-laden self that negotiates ‘reality’. Homosexuality is the result of boys being brought up by neurotic women…Headaches are really Primal pains, cancer the consequence of repressed feelings.” p.115
“But it is also clear that less flamboyant examples of parental failure can produce emotional mayhem…-the trivial and the portentous all can and apparently do wield awesome deterministic influences. One twenty-seven-year-old reminisces about his childhood and recalls being hit by a swing. The memory flooded back and with it the pain – not the pain of the swing but the pain that Mommy was not there. The reason he forgot the swing was that he could not bring himself to recall how lonely and frightened he had been. Janov, characteristically, ends this account with the following comment:
’When he became ready to face the fact that his mother, whom he imagined to be loving, really didn’t care about him and never had, his memory of the swing became conscious, total and real.’
In actual fact, no evidence other than the frenzied memories dredged up by the patient is offered to support the diagnosis of a rejecting and unloving mother. The mother herself was never seen and no attempt is made to check the young man’s description of life as a child with any third party account. Nor is there any attempt to interpret his difficulty remembering the incident in any way other than that which fits with Primal theory” p.116
“It may be cynical to recall that Janov, for all his self proclaimed genius, was not working in a vacuum. In France, Frederick Leboyer was insisting that modern methods of delivery…caused traumatic effects on the newborn, while in Britain, R. D. Laing was musing on the possibility that many of us are suffering lasting effects from our umbilical cords being cut too soon. Earlier…Wilhelm Reich provided a highly emotive critique of the ‘inhuman but routine separation of birth’.”p117
“Janov’s insistence on being a pioneer, the discoverer of the causes of all neurosis, is a classic example of historical amnesia…there is no convincing evidence, behavioral or physiological, that so called ‘Primals’ differ from hysterical episodes or cathartic abreactions, phenomena which have an elaborate history and a pedigree which includes some of the most significant names in the history of psychopathology including Mesmer, Charcot, Bernheim, Janet and Freud himself.”p.117
“As for his ideas on birth trauma, they are the most obviously second-hand of the lot….Freud was speculating about the act of birth as a source of anxiety, an idea which was taken up by Otto Rank… The Trauma of Birth published in 1923…quoted Freud [as saying about Rank's manuscript] ‘it is the most important progress since the discovery of psychoanalysis’ p.117
“Janov may have to insist on the novelty of his ideas, and push this claim in a series of books, because he is in California where therapy is business and survival is linked with novelty and the publicity it generates. Janov is also fiercely protective about his creation.” p.118
“[The Feeling Child] book neatly illustrates the primal therapist’s love of scientific method and respect for scientific evidence. …it consists of a remarkable series of unsubstantiated yet striking claims concerning the pathological effects of parenthood, the traumatic impact of birth, the disastrous effects on adult personality of caesarean deliveries, (the clinching evidence for the last is that Primals in people born this way ‘lack the fluid rhythms of the usual birth contractions’!) Premature deliveries are due to unconscious maternal desires to be rid of the baby. delayed births due to equally unconscious desires to hang on. Neurotic women have children for the ‘wrong’ reasons…Accidental pregnancies are impossible in Primal women, many of whom ‘feel’ when ovulation begins within them.
…Janov distains to consider anything as complex as a parent-child interaction. Children, in his model, are passive, non-responsible and the helpless recipients of whatever their parents dish out. Nor is there any reference to the possibility that parental indulgence could produce problems in later adult life or inconsistency. In so far as any scientific literature is quoted, it is a hotch potch of ill-digested and often irrelevant references to endocrinology, neurology and outdated behavioral research. Footnotes abound instructing the inquiring reader how he can read ‘an excellent discussion’ of the diagnosis of neuroblastomas. But any references to such renowned workers in the field of child and family development as Jean Piaget, John Bowlby, Michael Rutter or Lee Robins in notable in its absence.”
(p.121)
“As far as Janov has described the qualities of a therapist there is the familiar Utopian grandeur enveloping the outline. A Primal therapist cannot have any defenses. He must permit ‘bone-chilling Pain’ to erupt in patients. He must be sensitive and perceptive, i.e. he must have felt all his Pains. He will be feeling and thus know when someone else is not. He needs to have an appreciation of scientific methodology and ‘know what evidence consists of’. … In fact, Janov relies entirely on piling anecdote upon anecdote to verify the ‘truth’ of his theory. And the claims are remarkable. Primal therapy makes breasts, hand and feet grow bigger. Males grow beards where before was pristine skin. The senses are heightened – one woman noticed her husband’s body odour for the first time after she primalled. Menstrual periods become regular, frigid women become sexually voracious” “tennis players play shots hitherto beyond their powers…The only scientific reference throughout this impressive testimony consists of a footnote to the work of Hans Selye on hormones and stress, the connection being clear to Janov but somewhat tenuous to any reader familiar with that particular area of research.” (p. 119-120)
“Whereas psychotherapy and psychiatric treatment in general tends to use as one of its measures of effect, a return by a sick patient to a premorbid level of social and personal functioning, Primal therapy makes a virtue out of a decline in functioning. Probation officers can no longer work. Psychologists take up menial unskilled work. Marriage counsellors give up. In each case Primal therapy opens their eyes to the pointlessness of their former work.Such information is relatively worthless when it comes to any attempt at evaluation. If it were put forward as a justification of the efficacy of drugs or behavior therapy it would be laughed out of court.” (p. 120)
“Janov is every bit as cavalier about his use of the notion of neurosis as he is about marshalling evidence showing how his therapy conquers it. The neurotic ’spends a lifetime doing unreal things’…The normal person, in contrast, is ‘defense-free, tensionless, non-struggling’…The normal is healthy. he doesn’t need to bother doctors because ‘there is no pull toward being unreal, no symbolic system to keep the body restless and fatigued’. (p.120)
Let’s Talk About ME, by Dr Anthony W. Clare, Sally Thompson, 1981, BBC. ISBN 0 563 17887 6
At the time of writing Dr Anthony Clare was a senior lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry and an Honorary Consultant at the Bethlem Royal and Maudsley hospitals in the UK; he was Medical Advisor to MIND and advisor to the World Health Organization.
