I think almost all the evidence that came out of the Primal Center is unreliable information, to be honest. I personally found a gulf of difference between the reliability of claims made in popular books in psychology, and the peer reviewed literature in psychology. Although both sometimes contain errors, I found peer-reviewed work is more reliable and less exaggerated. Dr Christy did not do a psychology doctorate, I think it was in nutrition, and Dr Janov did his doctorate dissertation on Jewish identification (not repression, memory, or trauma).

Brain scans have a remarkable persuasive quality to them. Researcher found that merely adding a picture of a brain map to a text about psychology led to the readers rating the text better than those rating the same text without a brain map. Even when the brain picture added no information at all to the text.

It is remarkable how easy it is to take EEG patterns and make them match whatever theory (or even religion) you ascribe to.

best wishes
Editor Debunking Primal Therapy

But the effect of Janov overwhelming everyone with an enormous number of words is that it can be convincing. The reader tends to think – okay I don’t have time for all this, but he has a PhD, so I’ll take his word for it.

Why does Arthur Janov write so much on his blog and so many books? It never seems to end. If words are a metaphor for bullets, it feels like he’s taking an Uzi submachine gun and saturating targets in every conceivable direction. Is there a strategy behind this copious writing?
Are there some inherent mental advantages to writing more material compared to less that we, the public, should be aware of?

I don’t agree with your summary, but I think your ideas illustrate the motivations behind why intelligent people have gotten involved in primal therapy in the past. The claim that there are double blind studies that prove primal therapy works was certainly one of the reasons I got involved many years ago. I learned that that evidence is not really what it says it is. By all means find that evidence and email it to me, just in case I missed something.

The idea that Real Primal Therapy exists only in one center is mildly cultic in my opinion. Similar claims are made by scientology. My guess is that in some instances the primal therapy in Australia was remarkable similar to the primal therapy in Los Angeles. The idea that there has been no wierd cultic nonsense go on in Los Angeles Primal Therapy is mildly insane, and ahistoric.

After seeing behind the scenes of primal therapy, I don’t actually trust claims like “a million dollars was spent doing double blind studies.” I just don’t trust that there is no exaggeration there. I don’t think they actually understand the difficulties involved in double blinding in psychotherapy, and I doubt very much that they can show payments amounting to a million dollars going out to a truly independant research team. I don’t doubt that over a period of years, staff salaries of those involved in “research” added up to a million dollars – but that is not unusual for a psychotherapy practice, nor is it unusual for a pseudoscientific healing cult. Not only that some of that spending may have been to people with dual or multiple appointments (e.g. therapist, trainee, participant, and/or “researcher.”) I am not saying necessarily that primal therapy is a pseudoscientific healing cult, but you must understand that Scientology also claims to be leaders of science of the mind, and they also have spent millions on various things they would also call research.

Your post represents the type of misinformation that has prompted young people to adopt primal therapy as a cause and a vocation – and at much financial cost, opportunity costs, and sometimes a great emotional cost to themselves and their families.

My advice to young people is to take what Richard says with some skepticism.

If I had just a few sentences to say to a curious person considering investing time in primal therapy, I would simply counter Richard’s rhetoric with my advice and opinion:

“Primal therapy is a dishonest cultic psuedoscientific therapy that actually makes believers wacky in of itself, yet it gets them to write fantastic testimonials. It is a repressed memory therapy that runs the risk of creating false memories, and splitting up or spoiling family relations. Despite advocates’ claims, there is no credible scientific evidence for primal therapy, in the same way there is no credible scientific evidence for Scientology, multiple personality therapy, or speaking-in-tongues.

Young people: avoid this therapy and this vocational choice – that is my advice – take it or leave it.”

Editor,
DBT

Real Primal Therapy has never been practiced in Australia. The Australian psychotherapists who originally practiced it, and the ones doing it today, were not trained at the Primal Center in Los Angeles. Dr. Arthur Janov states that the Australian “Mock therapy” is completely different to his therapy.

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy does not provide any evidence of permanent normalisation of vital signs and hormones. Patient testimonials are the only evidence provided, and any respectable therapist will know that patients frequently provide statements which are unwittingly invented to appease the therapist, or invented because of an overwhelming desire to believe there has been some improvement, or written factually in response to a numbing of emotions and sensations. The Primal Center does not consider the numbing of feelings (increasing repression) to be satisfactory evidence of a cure. Correctly practiced Primal Therapy does the very opposite; it allows the patient to feel and resolve memories from the past. It is the resolution of feelings that extinguishes the alarm signals coming from the unconscious.

The Primal Center will not invest in more studies until it receives interest from other parties. Currently the Primal Center is investing in ongoing research and development, and also provides some financial aid for patients who cannot afford the therapy. In addition to physiological improvement, the vast majority of real Primal Therapy patients claim to feel far more alive, relaxed, and happy. Their testimonials are not less credible than the testimonials provided by CBT patients or any other patients for that matter.

I feel that this website has missed the point. We need to investigate Primal Therapy to see if their claims are correct. There is definitely a lack of peer-reviewed evidence, so let’s find some reviewers who are willing to look at the evidence.

Richard Atkin

richardatkin@windowslive.com

I encourage readers to check the peer reviewed evidence for any given therapy. PsychINFO is a good place to start. You are right that some therapies do have evidence of effectiveness.

As I’ve expressed elsewhere, I had my “fling” with Primal Therapy here in Australia, back in the late 70s, when a Melbourne psychiatrist imported it into our country after he’d experienced it in the U.S. I had my 3-week “intensive”, followed by a year or so of group sessions. Since the person assigned as my “therapist” – a misnomer, as her only qualification was that she’d been “through” the therapy with the psychiatrist as her therapist – seemed particularly clueless, I left formal therapy after that year, but remained involved with “Primal people”, some of whom had constructed their own “scream rooms”, which I would use from time to time. Eventually even that seemed a waste of time – the “Primal community” had splintered into dozens of directions, indulging in practices ranging from the absurd to the ridiculous (past lives, psychic abilities – you name it and there were certain “primalers” who believed in it), and thus my association with this faux “therapy” came to an ignominious end.

Throughout the years since then, I’ve come to see the entire enterprise as a scam, particularly that version of it practiced here. It really is a case of “let the buyer beware”.

These days, I see far more promise in therapies like CBT, in particular Act (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, but pronounced as the word, “act”), which came out of the CBT background. These types of mindfulness-based therapies are developing a growing body of evidence for efficacy – something sorely lacking in Primal Therapy and other fringe therapies.

Regards,
M