Intellectual_Abuse
Intellectual Abuse
In my opinion the primal books, official websites (and wikipedia’s entry on “primal therapy” at the time of writing) all contain what could be termed “intellectual abuse“. By this, I don’t mean that it is abuse because it over-intellectualizes things, or that the realm of the intellectual is bad. What I mean is that the theories are incorrect, confusing and intellectually restricting.
Primal therapy is intellectual abuse because it claims to be science, when it is not, it claims to cure when it does not have any evidence for that, it claims to be involved in ongoing research which is highly misleading. It claims to have done 30 years of scientific research which is misleading. It manipulates the reader with intellectual explanations of bad results. It takes psychologist Alice Miller’s eventual rejection of primal therapy and turns it around as proof of why not to trust non-Janov trained therapists. It turns black into white and white into black.
It turns dreadful results into across the board successes by redefining success! It redefines abreaction and catharsis to mean “non connected” feeling, when the real meanings of these words does not exclude the feelings being real or connected. It turns the story of the Center for Feeling Therapy around, so that no responsibility is taken by Janov for the people he trained and influenced, and uses the story to divert attention from problems that have happened and still may happen in “real” primal therapy. Like scientology, it is confusing intellectual abuse that is manipulative and misleading.
It is intellectual abuse because every few years they hail the therapy that they now do as “light years behind what was done before.” After difficult periods or negative reports, they reinvent primal therapy by calling it “advanced primal therapy.” However, in my experience it was not much better than old primal therapy, and even suprisingly similar in some ways (but different in other ways) to what I read about the Center for Feeling Therapy (in Insane Therapy, Ayella and Therapy Gone Mad, Mithers). The readvertising as advanced scientific primal therapy is again misleading and confusing to people. This repositioning may also occur in the future.
It is intellectual abuse because it is “epistemologically challenged.” This means primal theory doesn’t follow the laws of knowledge gathering or science, that it creates axioms and assumptions far ahead of what is allowed in science. It is disturbing because that precise subject, epistemology, is part of the subject philosophy, and Janov tells his followers that ‘the beginning of philosophy is the end of feeling’ which basically is giving the message that you will lose your feelings (and chance to heal and become real) if you learn philosophy (basically if you think too much about it). It is also interesting that the subjects of love and ethics usually fall in the realm of philosophy because the primal books seem to claim exclusive knowledge about love, whilst at the same time claiming ethics are taken care of by feelings naturally.
The intellectual abuse in Janov’s works has led to such things as people dropping out of college, dropping out of their profession, becoming psychoanalytically judgmental, incurring many opportunity costs, developing poor logic (unfalsifiable explanations for everything you can think of), developing a poor outlook, reducing ambition, difficulty making friends outside the primal group, damaging relations with family or even suicides.
It is Janov’s attack on most other authorities in knowledge, on mainstream society, on science and on politics that leaves the primal follower isolated from normal culture, and with nowhere to go except a primal community. If not acknowledged, this brainwashing endures, even beyond the participants realization that primal therapy does not cure diseases. As a result, many primal therapy book readers retain a tendency to trust untested treatments over tested treatments, and untested theories over accepted theories. The mistrust of maintream society, jobs and people continues because Janov undermined such trust in his books, whilst inadvertently promoting unearned blind trust in primal therapists and other primal participants.
