Why do we have an insane treatment of insanity?

Comments to Art Janov’s The Insanity in the Treatment of Insanity

Why do we have an insane treatment of insanity?



Before I understood PT, “evolution in reverse” and what pain could be, I thought I was stupid. A few times when I began to study psychology, I became confused and scared that something in my intellectual capacity was missing. The words didn’t fit with what I felt and how I saw things as an epileptic. My driving force to study was of course to gather knowledge to be able to figure out why I had seizures and fits. However, the more I ruminated thoughts and ideas about my illness, the more I suffered. I managed a few credits in psychology but gave up any thoughts of a degree. That did not mean that I stopped working with problems related to human behavior. Quite, the contrary. 

After having encountered PT and having taken an early decision, when my situation allowed me, to confront, head on my, my pain and epilepsy, I started to get hints at an answer to my question why I had epilepsy. The fascinating thing was, and still is, that this way I would learn about psychology through my feelings. My most dramatic experience was when I discovered / felt / relived my very subtle neurotic behavior to try to be someone I was not and to act in such a way that I could be accepted, loved and respected for something that was a neurotic fake. The pain behind it was so horrible and intense - it was like my head was squeezed with such a violent force that it felt like something in the brain crashed like a light bulb. When I felt that immense pain, I recognized the tremendous force which had propelled my ambitions for years and years to achieve love and acceptance. I had made me run, act and risk at a degree which had nothing to do with my real needs during 40 years. When I could not resist the perpetual pressure, but the gates broke open I had fits and seizures which later turned into birth primals and relived pain.

I would have liked Lennart Nilsson, the famous photographer, who filmed “A Child is Born”, to have filmed my brain, during my abnormally extended birth process, during an epileptic seizure, during my birth primals and when I acted in my most successful neurotic manner. If he had been able to rig up cameras in the 3 crucial levels in my brain, we could have shown the whole world that my neurotic 3rd line behavior was propelled by 1st line pain which processes were communicated and masterminded by the electrochemical intelligence in the limbic center. He would also have been amazed by the fact that my vital signs, before the pain was felt (which happened gradually and took years) were so high and afterwards ended up below what is considered “normal”. And so they have stayed.

My pain was immense, but my physical vitality was high, my social security network stable, my epileptic drugs effective that I managed for many years to maintain a neurotic appearance as a “success”, which I within myself could not live with. Unfortunately, I have seen many of the same kinds around me. Most of them think that it is the way it is supposed to be. Extremely few believe that my story is possible. Members of my first family cannot stand that I leave out my lifelong fight with a horrible birth, my experiences in PT and my story that much of my business success was a neurotic behavior. Some of them are devastated, probably by feeling their own pain.

I think that their very common and pain driven reaction is what makes today’s cognitive psychotherapy possible. As Art says; “the cognitive therapists skim the surface like their therapy,” and that is what most people ask for. “Any therapy which does not deal with Primal Pain as its primary goal can never resolve neurosis or its symptoms. The same can be said of most political systems as well. Either you fulfill needs - personal or social - or you suppress it”. (AJ)

Jan Johnsson