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New Age Blues (1979)
a book by Michael Rossman,
from the chapter “The I-Scream Man Cometh“
“Dr Arthur Janov, entrepreneur of the Primal Scream gave a talk at Berkeley….James found Janov utterly charming, candid, delightful-’pure Beverly Hills’…Often his audiences scream at him and interrupt the speeches which he no longer likes to give; so this night he had written a paper which his research assistant would read…It concerned the physiological concomitants of Primal Therapy, and was quite long..
[after the lecture, a movie followed, a tape of a primal session:]
“…the fellow starts screaming, working himself into an awful state. Later we find he’s really their champion screamer, he’s been in Primal Therapy for four years, twice a week, he goes and pays them money and screams.
“So he’s working up momentum, we see his facial contortions, the fat all over him quivering in time with the music. Meanwhile the camera keeps cutting to shots of the Researcher, bending over the dials of the electrocardiograph and the sphygmomanometer, their needles also quivering in time, as he announces the readings. And then suddenly they cut the movie, censor the middle part because, as they tell us. they don’t think we can take it….Janov now comes to answer questions. Someone asks him where his papers have been published. Only in the journal of his own institute, he says, because the scientific establishment is dead set against any disruption of its orthodoxes…
[my highlight, see section 4 on peer review and replication, and Stanovich's and Lilienfeld's writing on pseudosciences]
“…Someone asks about the Screamer, how well he can cope now. Janov says cheerfully that he’s a mess and can’t cope at all now…”
“Janov’s people call it ’primalling’ and get huffy if you call it screaming…. The Screamer’s physiological response was really remarkable-his pulse went up to 220…
“…We find out what he’s screaming about: his mother gave him a present for Father’s Day when he was nine, and if he hadn’t repressed the pain of it he’d have gone crazy or died. He got down to the incident in his very first session, and has been screaming about it for four years. I think he’s learned to do it very well; it shows what practice will do for you. And it’s a mistake to dismiss him as just a pain junkie, because he’s clearly enjoying himself and proud of his accomplishment.
“…he’s explaining how the Father’s Day trauma keeps on making it impossible for him to relate to women who are weak, because they demand him to be strong, which he resists; and to women who are strong, because they demand his weakness, which he also resists… as he says to the Therapist ‘What I want is to have the same kind of a relation with a woman as I have with you,’ and reaches out and touches her foot.
“At the film’s end the Screamer is asked whether he thinks the therapy is successful. Of course it is, he says, he wouldn’t do it if it weren’t-which seems reasonable. And he should know, he’s the champ. Then Janov comes back to answer some more questions. He’s very impatient with theoretical structures, he has a simple criterion of success; does it get to the pain? No other therapies do, he says, so they’re irrelevant. He himself has never been through a full primal, because it wasn’t available when he invented it, but he did spend a week last year screaming with a therapist he trained. he says it was just horrible. The therapist, who is there, says getting to the pain is what’s hard, and that after that he personally loves it; and says ‘you loved it too, Art.’ Art thinks, and agrees that he loved it too.
“But it’s very dangerous, he says to start Primal Therapy and open up the pain, and then discontinue therapy before you’ve learned to handle the pain. About 700 people have gone through authentic Janov screaming…;most of them are still going through it. Most of the graduates have become primal therapists themselves, though a few flunked. It’s a pretty straightforward kind of school: you learn to do something well, then you teach others to do it. Someone asks Janov what his graduates are interested in, besides screaming. ‘They’re interested in living’ he says, ‘but they have come to believe that society is essentially hopeless.’
“Then Janov tells us how he came to invent Primal Therapy. He went off in his garage with his dog and screamed. Pragmatic science. Janov’s wife thought he was off the walls, but the dog didn’t mind. He sees the dog as the model therapist: it licked his hand while he screamed, and never said much.
“The full introductory version, before they put you on maintenance, involves being in his clinic for three weeks, around the clock. No drinking or smoking; you go through a fast and a dietary regimen, and a long buildup ’til you get to make your first scream. The elements are all pretty traditional: isolation, deprivation, anticipation, and suggestion. You can teach people a lot of different things that way. Brainwashing and the vision-quest both use it.
“…Somebody asks him, well, what happens after you do get in touch with the pain, where do you go from there? Janov says it’s a sticky question, he doesn’t really know. What he did was to start a school, to teach therapists how to teach other people to reach the pain. He hasn’t found a way to measure it yet, but his researcher is trying….
“Janov is really a perfect model of what’s going around now, better even than the Maharishi, a guru teaching one obsessive yoga, surrounded by dependent devotees. That business of starting a school in his image, it’s the custom with all the new therapies-I guess he picked it up by being a trained Freudian, before he went maverick…
January 1976″ (pages 26 to 28)
New Age Blues, Michael Rossman, (1979) ISBN 0-525-47532-X
Online link: http://mrossman.org/newageblues/janov.html
