Your_Stories_3
Your Stories and Comments 3
“Thank you!
Incredible, what surprises me is it took 40 years for somebody to SAY something!
Thank you for putting your abilities to save desperate and good willing human beings.
Bless you and hope you and many of us with you will find support.
Since I first read the first primal scream over two decades ago, at first, I was fascinated by the “discovery” of Dr. Janov on healing, anyone suffering or a family or friend wouldn’t hesitate to consider primal therapy. It sounded miraculous and I was ready to face it had I the money. However, the more I tried to understand it the more I got entangled about it. This website done by a person who has been in it confirms my doubts and he explains it so well, it makes sense.
Anybody that has healed in life would be so well as to want to share with the world his or her ideas. The secrecy was disturbing and it was like plunging into the blue sea hoping for the best. I am now pleased I never was rich enough to adventure there. The prerequisites were impossible for the majority, thank God!
The more I read about the center the more it assumed a mysterious and or cult aspect. Many can’t breakaway when they realize it is not what they thought. Another example is like somebody who has believed in God all their life and comes to the realization that nothing like that exists - at least in the way it had been conceptualized.”
C.F. Italy, Aug 2007
“In a way, those that become disillusioned by their experiences at the ‘genuine’ Primal Center are fortunate. For the rest of us who take the cut-price route, there is always the thought that things would have worked out better at Janov’s Center. It’s like: ‘Well my local priest might have abused me, but the Pope would know better’. Or, it’s a bit like when my brother told me as clearly as he could that his primal therapy was underwhelming, I knew I would be different. I would feel ‘real’ feelings and I would resolve them. I would have experiences like in the Janov books – not like his inadequate feelings …..
Without your site, I would not have come to think that the whole primal enterprise itself is flawed. Instead, I would have gone on thinking that Janov might seem arrogant, that therapy was not widely available, that it was too expensive, that some of the participants might be dogmatic, but not that primal therapy itself might not be at all like in the books.
Primal therapy will not reveal its techniques; it will not acknowledge the importance of those who come to similar conclusions but under a different name (like the work Alice Miller). It will not subject itself to truly independent evaluation. It will not even put any time frame for how long we should all wait until we are ‘well’. Yet the validity of competing therapies is rejected by Janov on the most superficial evaluations of their ideas. Imagine Janov giving credence to any other therapy which took a decade to complete!
Janov claims that if we do not agree with his truth, it is because we do not have access to our deepest feelings. If we do agree, the only choice we have is to come to him. There are no half measures – the Primal Training Center , or nowhere, Primal Therapy or mock therapy, Connection or abreaction. Janov says that his therapy is as precise as surgery, but his claims are based on … his own claims. It had never really struck me before that primal theory was just a point of view held by a small group of therapists and patients, a point of view held together by financial interest, self justification and hope. I thought there would be an unbreakable truth at its core – Janov may not be perfect, but he had made a genuine discovery.
It’s actually worse than this though – once your authenticity is challenged in therapy (it happened to me in a few groups) one starts to have doubts about the reality of your feelings – am I really real? And the abuse in therapy puts a whole new layer of suffering (fourth line pain!) over childhood pain – it’s like getting dental floss stuck in your teeth when you’re trying to floss.
Without evaluation from people who are independent from primal (not Janov, not therapists, not ever-hopeful patients), the primal clique can continue to define the views of anyone who disagrees as not valid. I think you make the point well – it takes the group pressure to ensure that people hold true to the cause. Outside primal centers and primal books, the ideas seem detached – not mad, just strange and unrelated to the rest of the world. Janov starts from a solid core – the importance of love and caring in infancy and childhood. But he’s not the first to point this out.
Primal theory was one of the influences on my family and helped lead us to ‘contact parent’ our children, though we were influenced by other writers too (‘Birth without Violence’ speaks volumes without dogma).
Me, I am more interested in politics and love. Good luck and thanks.”
D.C. Europe July 2007.
[A former patient of a formerly Janov certified therapist from the Paris Institute.]
“I think there’s a lot of good stuff there that needed to be said, especially the section on IATROGENIC THEORY. I hope potential patients, in
Europe especially, read this.”
A.D. July 2007, USA
[A participant at Dr Janov's Primal Center in both the 1990s and 2000s.]
“I identify strongly with your description of the effect of people reading Janov books. At 19 I picked up a copy of ‘Primal Man’ and felt that it explained my discontent. It sent me into a tailspin when I realized that the therapy was only available in the USA and was beyond my financial means. I read everything I could about Primal Therapy – it seemed totally beyond me to pull myself together to work to afford £5,000 – especially when the primal books helped me to feel so bad. And of course, according to Janov, nothing else would come close to his therapy at his Institute…
[I] discovered that one of Janov’s senior therapists from the Paris Institute…was offering therapy at much reduced costs close to where we lived!
[therapy occurred mid 1980s] [name omitted] the therapist, was a relaxed, friendly man who was disarmingly honest…
[I observed someone who] breezed through the intensive phase with [an associate therapist of the one mentioned above] as her therapist, but felt she was pushed too hard. When the dust had settled on her three months of therapy she said she felt a shadow of herself. She was permanently anxious or depressed…Certainly she blamed the therapy for leaving her a mess.
For me [with the Janov trained therapist mentioned above], I ‘got into’ a lot of stuff in my three weeks and in one session in the intensive period, I felt I stood on the edge of extremely deep feelings (subsequently I discovered these were birth feelings). However, after a few months of attending group sessions I left therapy feeling that I was traveling too far for too little. The therapists seemed to offer nothing special – certainly no more than my partner could offer. I also became interested in radical politics and found myself rejecting the cost, hierarchy and supposed expertise of therapy.
The effect of Janov writing his powerfully emotional books is that he must frustrate the huge numbers of his readers, who see primal therapy as the answer to their misery, and then cannot get to his Center. I certainly feel that the effect of this is ‘iatrogenic’ as you suggest.
…with the Primal Scream selling over a million copies, there are masses of people who have read his books and been told that they are living half lives, that they need to resolve their childhood pain, that there is only one therapy which can achieve resolution of their pain without merely scratching the surface (or causing untold damage), that this therapy is only available in one place in the world (even after 40 years of the therapy existing) and that it will cost them thousands of dollars to uproot and live in LA.
To me, the claims made in the book are irresponsible. Even though Janov says now that science backs him up, his earliest books were written without any real scientific evidence, and they were even more sweeping in their praise for his therapy and condemnation of any other therapeutic approach. How could he be so sure without this evidence? After all, many people say that religion has saved them, that they are cured or reborn. Without independent research, how can anyone say that their religious experiences are any less valid than those of primal patients?
The effect of Janov’s writing is to leave many people distressed that they cannot be ‘real’, that they are neurotic and can never be at ease without undergoing a process that they will not be able to afford to do. By all means tell people about humane birthing, about loving your children etc, but don’t tell people their lives will remain empty without your therapy. People like Leboyer, Odent and Montague managed to express similar ideas about childhood experience without condemning great swathes of humanity as neurotic.
I heard Janov on a radio program recently say that nowhere else do they practice proper primal therapy – what do they do wrong at the Primal Institute which is a few miles from his Center? Does he reject the work of his former wife and the other therapists he worked alongside for years?
… on the fate of Dr [name omitted] – whose path went from [Primal Therapy to] fundamentalist Christianity to death from cancer - is worrying. Surely he can’t claim that [name omitted] received ‘mock’ primal therapy since he got ‘authentic’ primal therapy at Janov’s own Institute!
The problem is lack of independence….He writes books which bring him income. He runs a Center which brings him fees from patients. Not that I think he deliberately misleads, he is just very selective in what he reveals and is optimistic that his great discovery will one day be vindicated. Wishful thinking supported by self interest.
Having read nearly [all] of the Janov books, I am too aware of inconsistencies and weirdness - especially in the early books. For example: his stopping people going to the toilet so they don’t ‘piss out the feeling’, people getting into birth feelings on day one of therapy, the way LSD was discussed in early books, the scary depiction of his therapy in the book ‘Psychobabble’, the claim that no married couples in therapy separate, the [allegedly] ‘incompetent’ neurological descriptions in the Anatomy of Mental Illness, the disappearance/decline/death of [name omitted], the lack of real support for his research from Hoffman and Steven Rose, the low numbers of accredited therapists practicing even after so many years, the high cost of the therapy, [criticism omitted] , the lack of any support for his ideas from the scientific establishment – it goes on and on.
I am also surprised that Janov [regarding literature on primal therapy official websites] makes mileage from [famous person's name omitted] having Primal Therapy. Firstly – what about patient confidentiality? How happy would [name omitted] be that – years after his attendance, Janov is saying that [name omitted] was awash in pain and could not leave his house, that he had used LSD and that he had a lot of pain…? Also, Janov’s therapy may have helped inspire [some artistic work by the person], but [name omitted] went on to leave Primal Therapy, to abuse alcohol, to become a heroin addict, to believe in mysticism and spirituality, and even reject the validity of his time in therapy - hardly a ringing endorsement of primal therapy!
Yes, evidence seems to support that early trauma can cause mental health problems and physical illness….However, does revisiting early experiences in therapy really bring about the fantastic changes that Janov describes? The answer is inconclusive at best. There is too little independent research, too many unanswered questions, and too few people who have clearly benefited from the therapy….
Primal feelings helped me, but in a more incomplete way than I hoped. I feel better, but I don’t feel ‘post primal’.
[The following is from a different email by the same primal participant:]
If the therapy doesn’t help patients - it’s because they took drugs,
they didn’t stick to the rules for the intensive period, because they
has unreal expectations, because they tried too hard and abreacted
instead of primalled, because they left too early, because the therapy
was done incorrectly (as it is in everywhere but where Janov is), etc -
NOT because primal therapy or theory is flawed. Failure in therapy can
be defined as [being] outside proper primal theory or practice. A good way to
keep 100% success rate!”
D.C., Europe July 2007
