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Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives (1996)
By Mark Pendergrast
Excerpt, page 444:
…it was psychologist Arthur Janov who provided the prototype for the current therapist with his wildly popular 1970 book, The Primal Scream. Janov’s patients were told that they must recall repressed memories of trauma at the hands of their parents, and that only reliving them – and screaming bloody murder – would they be healed. “It is possible that a major Primal Scene can occur in the earliest months of life,” he wrote, an event “so intrinsically shattering that the young child cannot defend himself and must split away from the experience.” The therapist didn’t have to worry about a particular symptom list because “all neuroses stem from the same specific cause.” Once cured by the Primal Scream(s), a patient would lead “a tensionless, defense-free life in which one is completely his own self and experiences deep feeling and internal unity.”
The process by which Janov elicited the screams would be familiar to any brainwashing expert. For three weeks, patients must not work or attend school. During the first weeks, patients must stay in a hotel room without TV, radio, or any other distraction. The night before their first session, they should not sleep. “The isolation and sleeplessness are important techniques which often bring patients close to a Primal,” Janov noted. “Lack of sleep helps crumble defenses.” Noting with satisfaction that patients arrive already suffering, the therapist instructs them to lie spread-eagle on a couch “in as defenseless a physical position as possible.” Patients are then encouraged to “sink into the feeling” of childhood. After a “chipping away process” of several hours – during which Janov urges “Feel that!” Stay with it!” – they finally arrive at their Primal Scene and scream something like, “Daddy, be nice!”, “Mommy, help!” or “I hate you. I hate you!”
Janov stressed repeatedly that this is an anti-intellectual therapy. “In no case are ideas discussed,” he noted firmly. Of course, the therapist’s ideas are quite clearly conveyed. “Letting down and being that little child who needs a ‘mommy’ helps release all the stored-up feeling.” At the end of the day, the patient returns to his hotel room. “He may still not watch television or go to the movies. He really does not want to because he is consumed with himself.”
Virtually any trauma, no matter how trivial, could provoke a Primal Scream from the Primal Pain Pool. Nonetheless, the parents were always to blame, as with a father who forced his child to ride a horse. After the patient finished venting his rage at his father, he switched to the “enabling” mother: “Why didn’t she stop him? She was so weak. She never protected me from him.” Of course, Janov savored any incest he managed to uncover, even if it wasn’t altogether necessary. He recounted one man’s memory of a mother’s kiss: “she stuck he tongue in my mouth. Can you imagine? My own mother. My God! She always wanted me instead of Father. Mother! Leave me alone! Leave me alone!”
Joe Hart and Richard “Riggs” Corriere soon founded the Center for Feeling Therapy, an off-shoot of primal screaming. During the ‘70s, their Center turned into a psychotherapeutic cult, as documented by Carol Lynn Mithers in her disturbing 1994 book, Therapy Gone Mad. The indoctrination/ therapy process she describes involved rewriting the patients’ past and fostering a complete dependence on therapists. “Men and women with different histories and personalities all emerged similarly furious at their parents, denouncing their past lives and speaking the same loud phrases… And when patients started feeling confused or lost, they didn’t turn to old friends or ways of coping. They turned to the only people who really knew how to feel… They turned to their therapists.”
The Center eventually self-destructed in 1980, spasmodically dying off in numerous lawsuits. Mithers; tragic conclusion sounds eerily similar to the aftermath of recovered memory therapy: “There was no way to undo years of family estrangement, no way to bring back missed Thanksgivings and Christmases or to reconcile with parents who’d died before the Center’s end. There was no way to bring back marriages destroyed a decade before.”
I have only scratched the surface of this subject here, but it should be clear that the repressed memory craze is part of a continuum of therapeutic approaches that blame parents for all problems….”
Victims of Memory: Sex Abuse Accusations and Shattered Lives (1996), Mark Pendergrast. VT: Upper Access. ISBN-13: 978-0942679182
