Psychological Society 1979 Gross
The Psychological Society (1979)
Martin L. Gross
From Chapter IX: “The New Therapies, the New Messiahs”
A woman in her forties, dressed in a long peasant skirt, sat crouched on the floor as her “primal-type” therapist spoke to her reassuringly. After fifteen minutes of dramatization of her father’s death, the therapist asked the distraught subject to lie down on a mattress in the center of the darkened room.
The woman was told to increase her breathing depth. The therapist placed his elbow in the region of her solar plexus and pressed until she emitted short bursts of painful sounds. He offered her a baby bottle to suck on, but she refused. He worked closely with her, cajoling, then pressing to elicit deeper and deeper breathing. His frustration increased as she failed to achieve the hoped-for primal, the dramatic, sometimes violent return to screaming infancy hailed by some therapists as the most startling innovation since Freud’s miracle cure of Viennese hysterics.
When her thrashing threatened to throw her off the mattress, group members rushed to hold down the sheet, trapping the “infant” within the crib of her fantasy. The pitiful wailing and thrashing kept up for five minutes, when the cry finally wound down. When the sheet was removed, an exhausted middle-aged woman returned from her hysterical voyage in time.
The incident, witnessed at a Philadelphia growth center, was one of the fashionable new manifestations of Psychological Society [this term was introduced by Gross earlier in the book to mean a society heavily into psychotherapy and self-help]. It is an offshoot of Primal Scream Therapy, developed by Arthur Janov, (Ph.D.), a Beverly Hills psychologist who operates the Primal Institute in Los Angeles.
“Primal therapy is the movement in psychiatry today,” Dr. Janov commented when interviewed. “We are perhaps the busiest clinic in the world. We receive three thousand applications each month from people all over the world who want to be treated. We accept only ten. Primal therapy has become a phenomenon. The reason for its success is that it is true.
“It is a highly precise therapy, which is why I insist on training all therapists at my institute,” he continued. “In the hands of an untrained person, it is a highly dangerous technique. There are some two hundred and fifty phony therapists claiming to do Primal practicing right now. We are suing two or three of them for unauthorized use of the name.”
Janov has popularized primal therapy through a promotional technique borrowed for Freud himself. Like Freud’s claims of miraculous cure in Studies on Hysteria (1896), Janov believes in the magic of Primal as the only cure for man’s troubled psyche, what he calls psycho-physical illness. “By implication, this renders all other psychological theories obsolete and invalid,” Janov says.
Janov is one of the Psychological Society’s new messiahs, a successor to those who have followed the first messiah, Freud. It is part of an apparently endless chain of philosopher-healers who offer the masses psychic bliss in exchange for personal immortality. Each is encouraged to pen popular books on how to achieve health, happiness, even wealth, through their mental technology. In the theological vernacular, it is a perpetual second coming of Freud, a contemporary reincarnation of the Viennese miracle worker.
The popularity of the new messiahs is enormous, for they offer the public something that psychoanalysis with its customary five or six years on the couch, or even $50-an-hour conventional psychotherapy of a year or two’s duration, cannot. The new therapies are brief, less intellectual in an age of hurried ideas, more emotional, and they offer the promise of an immediate, even if transient, feeling of well-being.
In conventional therapy the patient ponders and talks. In the new “quickie” therapies, which can take anywhere from only days to months, the patient participates with his feelings, his screams, his games, his obscenities, even his body. In addition to costing less, taking less time and promising as much as traditional methods, the new therapies seen to many distraught patients to even be more fun.
The message of each pretender to Freud’s throne generally contradicts those of the competitors. But this does not dim the interest of the hopeful, gullible consumers of the Psychological Society.
Janov’s claims are obviously scientific hyperbole. But his impact on therapy users, who feed on newness, is real. In addition to Janov’s patients, thousands have been screaming, crying and kicking out their repressions in the offices of the two hundred and fifty “unauthorized” primal therapists.
“I practiced traditional psychoanalysis for years, but I have now moved almost completely into primal,” says Herman Weiner, Ph.D., a training analyst at the National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis. “Like many of my colleagues I was initially skeptical. I even refused to read Janov’s book. Now I believe primal will replace traditional therapy to an enormous extent – it is a real revolution.” Dr. Weiner glanced down at the mattresses on his office floor, one for the patient, the other for the therapist. “Freud brought is halfway down, to the couch. Janov, all the way down,” he observed.
As a theorist, Janov is deified by his followers. But as a movement leader, he has gained their hostility. “Most innovators are proud if other people practice their method, but not Janov,” says one primal practitioner. “He’s really out-of-sight – on a personal ego trip. He utilizes the Freudian idea of abreaction, and the bioenergetic idea that neurosis and tension are also in the body. There are also Gestalt techniques in primal, but Janov gives credit to no one except for some mention of Freud.”
Why the interest in primal-therapy? Many believe it is because Janov rediscovered the earlier, more exciting Freud. Through catharsis and abreaction - the talking out and unloading of emotions – Freud supposedly released repressed traumatic memories in his patients. Freud claimed hysteria patients “suffered from reminiscences.” Once freed of these agonizing memories, they would be cured.
The painful-trauma theory has been mainly discarded by formal psychoanalysis. But it has been vigorously reconstructed by Janov. Janov calls it the Primal Pool, a damned-up pool of anguish which must be flooded out. As in early Freud, Pain is the essence of the Janovian theory. (He always capitalizes this sacred word.) “The severity of neurosis depends on the amount of accumulated Pain,” Janov states.
Like Freud, Janov is not particularly interested in the hectic here and now. Since his cause of mental illness is early pain, Janov claims that nothing which deals with present symptoms can result in a cure. To move his patients back, Janov puts them into Primals, the bizarre reliving of infant and childhood experiences, sometimes accompanied by bloodcurdling screams.
Janov’s description of a Primal Group seems like a Fellini interpretation of London’s ancient Bedlam. The decibel level rises to “close to jet noise,” he says. In the tableaux of the Primal Group room, one adult wails and sucks like an infant. Another patient is playing with a teddy bear; one man, hooked on pornography, stands surrounded by books and holding his penis; another waits in terror, as a whip held over him by a therapist reminds him of his punishing father. An exhibitionist shows his genitals, then falls screaming to the floor: “Mamma, show some feeling, please!”
Janov’s startling experience is duplicated by therapists elsewhere. “When Otto Rank proposed that birth was a traumatic experience, he wasn’t given much credence,” says Dr. Weiner. “I would not have believed it, but I have seen the trauma of birth re-created in birth Primals. The patient’s thumbs turn in to the fetal position. Then the feet turn in; the face becomes contorted. The person’s voice changes and emits infant sounds. I have even seen long infantlike plugs of mucous come out of their throat.
“Most of the primals I have seen are early ones with mother, from birth up to one year,” Dr. Weiner continued. “When the Primal Group is here I stand in the darkened room and listen to ten people on the floor all going at once. All I hear is ‘Mommy, I’m afraid. Mommy, love me. Mommy, don’t hate me.’ There is a lot of crying, and writhing in pain. We seldom see joy. What we are seeing is the repressed pain of infancy. Even if the whole theory of primal therapy is false, which I doubt, it works like nothing since shamanism.”
The Janov idea, simply stated, is that childhood trauma produces such pain that the young person seeks escape in neurosis. Janov’s theory fits the key psychological supposition that the child’s personality is environmentally produced in the first years of life. There is little attention given to genetics, or to the child’s temperament or constitution. As Janov says: “Primal Therapy is based on the assumption that we are nothing but ourselves. We are not born neurotic or psychotic. We’re just born.”
“It is a replay of Freudian theory of parents as arch villains. Throughout Primal Scream, Janov speaks of the misery of childhood, of brutal parents, especially fathers. He talks of Pain accumulated by the young which must be let out in primals if one is to recover.
Primal Therapy, as practiced by Janov, is itself a punishing technique. In the first twenty-four hours, the patient may be asked to stay up all night. They sob, even fear they are going crazy during the pretreatment period. As Janov says, “The patient arrives suffering…he maybe kept waiting five to ten minutes beyond his appointed time in order to allow more tension to build.”
As the psychoanalysis, the patient lies on a couch, but now his body is spread-eagled. The patient speaks of his early life, and is encouraged to call out for his parents. He is told to keep his mouth open so as not to “swallow” his feelings. He is asked to feel and to breathe. His throat and chest become tight, he begins “thrashing and writhing about in pain,” and finally a “scream” erupts in the form of a phrase – “I hate you!” or “Daddy be nice” – along with “torrents of Pain.” Says Janov, “This is the Primal Scream.”
Is Janov accepted by the psychological community? He is a popular new messiah, but in the clawing inner world of therapy, where one man’s holy cure is another’s nonsense, Janov is receiving his share of criticism.
Basically his critics say (I) that abreaction is not truly curative, (2) that Primal Therapy is early disproven Freud all over again, (3) that the Primal regression to childhood is possibly dangerous, (4) that Primals are faked.
Joseph Hart, Ph.D., a former Janov staff member who opened his own Center for Feeling Therapy in Los Angeles, is among the strongest of critics. “I disagreed with parts of Janov’s theory and therapy, and suggested corrections which he would not accept,” Hart recalled when interviewed. “He felt that if the patient has enough Primals he would lose all his defenses, and be cured. I don’t believe that is true.
“When we left Janov, forty percent of the patients came with us,” Hart continued. “After working with them, we found that most has been faking their Primals. They were simulating regression, just as some of Charcot’s patients had done in France in Freud’s time. It’s hard to say if they were consciously faking, but they had learned to do what their therapist wanted.”
Fake or real, the Primal is a replay of the ancient phenomenon of self-hypnosis triggering a hysterical incident. The phenomenon was seen by the Greeks; by religious evangelists; by Antoine Mesmer, the father of hypnotism; by Charcot, Freud’s mentor in France, and by Bernheim, the nineteenth-century master of suggestion who taught Freud. There is no possibility that the patient truly remembers his crib experiences. A more reasonable explanation is that Primal patients are modern hysterics who are undergoing an emotional catharsis - a technique which psychiatric history has shown not to be curative.” (Page 277 – 282)
The Psychological Society (1979). Martin L. Gross. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 0-671-24995-9
