My comments to Art Janovs' article On the Inability To Say "Good".

On the Inability To Say "Good"  (Click here to access the article)

Your story about “To Say Good”

As always your stories and reflections trigger a reaction. Often, I know what it is that stimulates me, but sometimes I am not certain. 

My father’s conditions to accept me were that I fulfilled his needs in the development of myself. In the position he held, considering his ambitions, he was certainly no failure as an instructor, department manager and functionary at an agricultural university. Having had better resources when he studied and with a little more ambition, I think he would have made an excellent head master. However, his constant depressions - loss of his mother and a couple of siblings as a 3-4-year-old due to a pandemic - broke down his innate Wallonian physical strength and his good looks and charm, and he died too early of a sudden heart attack when I was 40 and just had started PT.

I hated, repressed and needed him for almost a lifetime. I survived because I had something he did not have; My mother’s oxytocin producing feelings for me, which gave me enough strength to survive and rise from a pale, skinny boy with severe birth injuries to be an above average neurotic success. I was driven by my own pain and challenges to surpass my father with the mixed, undifined,  goal to both beat him and please him. Nethertheless, it was to late too receive the love he could not give when I needed it the most.

In relation to our fathers, I see no real difference in the effects of our stories, even if our sceneries and surroundings were totally different. Thanks to you, our fathers were “rich” sources for a good understanding of the impact of pain, and the endless act outs it creates. A pain which is and has been terrible but when the bulk of it is felt and comprehended, it can make life easy and natural and increase the understanding of the human conditions.

Jan Johnsson

PS

How can your instructive, congenial, pain provoking = health creating stories about yourself ever be narcissistic? It hurts when you are saying things like that! Stories about yourself are for sure the best help, there is to understand ourselves! At least, you have inoculated that attitude in me....

Arthur Janov said...

Jan and now you see the difference between insight therapy and primal. Insights chace down each act-out and t ry to explain it. Primal gets into the deep motivation that drives it. Insights is an endless task and that is why patients stay in their therapy for years; always the hope for an improvement that never comes. You words are so kind. love art