Two articles about Anxiety. (The Two Faces of Anxiety and Revisiting Anxiety)

Revisiting Anxiety      (Janov's Reflections)

(Click to access)

Time Magazine’s article is as good as most non-primal information I have read about anxiety. The paper by Alice Park is very ambitious, and I feel embarrassed when somebody calls it unprintable “5 cent wisdom”.

I interpret it as a serious intent to identify one of the most widespread health problems of our days. To me it seems serious to try to come to terms with, and explain our anxiety ridden reactions, whether we do it for good or bad. To know about imprinted pain from before birth and its lifelong impacts on our defenses and leaky gates take quite a trip and Alice Park can hardly be blamed for not having insight into evolution in reverse. How should a journalist, publishing an article in the prestigious Time Magazine, find and verify scientific and established information about how Dr. Janov and his disciples are seeing things? 

There are a few insiders understanding the healing which may be achieved by living old pain so still there is a way to go before the connections can be made to the areas where Alice Parker is lifting a warning flag for what is not good for us. She is identifying areas and examples where people, she is referring to, see the other face of anxiety. One, understandable, negative aspect of the article is that she does not mention all the people with heavy pain having efficient defenses, where the pain is transferred to the heart, the stomach and/or effects, the vital signs and shorten lives, escaping the anxiety label.

The world Alice Parker is writing about is a true reality for billions of people. We might say that most of them think and act wrongly. To reverse evolution and change the way very many are living takes a genius in the shape of an enlightened despot, “Evolutions own Steve Jobs”. However, even if it seems almost impossible, some of us know that the Janovian way works so at least in theory we have the tools for the future.

What a splendid article it might have been if Alice Parker had had the input of Art to show that for those, among all the curios people reading the article, there is an alternative.

Our problem is not whether Alice Parker is right or wrong, but that Art Janov’s Reflections are not in the Time Magazine. 

Jan Johnsson

PS

Since Alice Parker referred to Sören Kirkegaard (who Art also quotes) I remind us of:

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn't true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.” Sören Kirkegaard

Arthur JanovJan 30, 2012 01:43 PM

Jan I suggest to you to write to the author or magazine. art

Naranjas confitadas bañadas con chocolate “Ocumare”

On murderers and intellectuals in a psychopathy spectrum.

Janov's Reflection on

On Murder and Being an Intellectual  (Click to access)

Your Reflections on the psychopathy spectrum, with the psychotic psychopath Anders Breivik at one end and the diabolic manipulator Heinz Alfred Kissinger in the other end, is very interesting. In a review of Christopher Hitchens’s book “The Trial of “Henry” Kissinger”, Richard Stampfle nails the central issue of Henry Kissinger’s criminal conduct: “He draws on the analogy of money owed to a bank  - if you owe a small amount, the problem is yours; if you owe megabucks, it's the bank's problem. Likewise, if you are high on drugs, and kill one person, you have the problem; but if you are high on the arrogance of power, and cloak your actions in "statecraft," and are responsible for the death of millions, it is unlikely that you will be prosecuted, particularly if your country does not lose a war.”

It is an irony of fate that Breivik, who in a murderous rampage executed 77 people,  comes from Norway, a sweet and peaceful country with probably the highest standard of living on Earth. The same country, however,  awarded Kissinger, who with his highly skilled political manipulations had/has caused the death of almost as many people as there are in all of Norway, in 1973 with the Nobel Peace Prize. Breivik, it seems, is fairly easy to label as a psychotic psychopath, and we even say that he could not be reached. (Did anybody try to reach him?) It is almost impossible to say the same about Kissinger. Being a diabolic manipulator of immense dimensions, without performing personal killing, he needs a special category. With respect for political, religious, and intellectual powers, we hide our definitions more carefully and refer to Christopher Hitchens, who really did us a service with his book.

Having been through Primal Therapy during 4 decades, I have many times acted on the border of the psychopathological spectrum in order to arrange and change my life in accordance with prevailing conditions. I was in my mind convinced of what I was doing. However, I was and am the only one who has full transparency of my life before birth and the whole way to what it means no longer to be a prisoner of pain. If,  for example, at some unfortunate time, I had taken a wrong decision for which I could have been legally accused, it would probably have been impossible to use my real reason, to get rid of my imprinted pain, as an evidence or alibi.

As a further evidence how subtle and often unpredictable the conditions for mental recovery are, I would recall that I found my way to Primal Therapy through a Danish psychopath, who knew Raphael Montañez Ortiz, the (destruction) artist in New York who performed absurd notions going back and forth on the stage shouting for his mother. The Dane, “reached” me by recommending me to read “The Primal Scream”. The rest is history...

Jan Johnsson

Who needs more love?

So Who Needs More Love? (Art Janov's Reflection)

(Click to access)

Who needs more love?

Practical consequences of being deprived of love.

I followed the always exiting European soccer game (together with 100‘s of millions of TV-spectators around the globe) between Real Madrid and Barcelona the other night and it’s aftermath. Then I read your Reflections of the Human Conditions with great interest to see if I could find at least a farfetched answer to why certain key individuals behaviors, often predictable, turn out the way they do.

Professional soccer is filled of neurotic (some on the border  of psychotic) managers, trainers and players of which quite a few are earning between 10 and 20 million dollars a year which inflate both their egos and the superhuman performance expectations on them. When things do not turn out the way, the fanatic fans expect, no wonder that a repressed player after a few mistakes loses his control. As a response on a feeling of being worthless and unloved one of the players started to do evil things to his opponents. He performed in a few minutes, after having made a match crucial mistake, dirty tackles, stepped on a downed opponent’s hand and made an attempt to simulate to have been receiving an unfair impact of another opponent to his face.

Aterwards, he said (which he presumably was forced to do by his club) that what he had been accused of doing (in front of a few hundred million TV-viewer) he would never do to an opponent. He had not knowingly tried to damage his opponents. Nobody believes him, only the fact that so much money is in play for his club, Real Madrid, does that they close up around him and put the lid on.

The player in question has experienced a number of similar situations over the last few years. His behavior in a losing situation is very  predictable. His present trainer and responsible (being a Portuguese-speaking compatriot) is a “win at all cost BPD neurotic” with all the classic signs of having a need to compensate for loss of love in a crucial period of his life, which has made the player an easy victim for his psychotic pressure.

Even if I hated his behavior on Wednesday night, I feel sorry for the player, understanding the pain which causes his short circuits. They are not that far apart from what you have described about what has happened to a number of serial murderers. However, the multimillion-audience on the air, of which many are young kids, certainly do not forgive him for not having got enough love before or after his birth... And to advise him to go looking for the feeling of no love won’t be easy with his present trainer, José Morinhou.

Jan Johnsson

Hunting and Bullfighting!

My comments to:

Art Janov's Reflections on

On Going Hunting     (Click to access)

Hunting and Bullfighting!

In my layers of pain filled memories all the way down to the one being strangled and almost suffocated to death, is one, which has caused me many fits, anxieties and feelings of sorrow; when, at the age of 11, I killed a beautiful songbird with a slingshot. I was alone in the park close to my home when it happened, no one to impress. I just wanted to prove to myself that I mastered my homemade weapon. I immediately repressed the feeling of what had happened, and I hastily buried the beautiful bird in a little soil and put some leaves over... 10 years passed before, suddenly, I lived the memory in combination with a fit / hallucination, and I finally could feel the sorrow when I “saw” the little dead garden warbler and “felt” it’s still warm body.

I never became a hunter, not even during the years when I had my own farm with a hundred acres of forest. I leased the hunt to hunters with a license, because it was a necessity to control the population of animals, such as deers and elks. Many critics don’t know much about nature’s balance, animal’s populations. Without hunters, the ratio of animals, available space, available food would be thrown off. As humans, we are supposed to be the intelligent part of the evolutionary food chain, which needs a certain equilibrium.

You may be right that your congressmen belong to a minority, who goes hunting just for the fun of killing. What I, however, over the years have noticed is your, often documented, attitude towards neurotic, inclusive psychopathic, politicians. What a world it would be if all our politicians were running for office to serve, not to be served. A feeling politician (with a good communication between his right and left brain) never would forget his/her duty to serve the people he/she represents. I think that one important reason why we do not have politicians creating necessary values for us is that we do not think much about the values of our politicians when we elect them. We have the politicians we deserve. We are not doing our duty as citizens in a democracy. The politicians can / were never meant to be the parents many of us never had!

Like Hemingway, who taught me to try to be honest when writing, I love bull fights. I’m not proud of it, but I cannot deny that being in “Plaza de Toros” in Valencia together with 25.000 other spectators when one of the top bull fighters is performing is an emotional “trip”. I agree with you; it is ineffably cruel. The bullfighter does not win every time, and the bulls are not taken away from a suffering family. These are poor excuses from my side. The bullfights will disappear with time. Even if I’m attracted to them, I vote for a ban of the bullfights. That is my duty in and for a democratic society and a tribute to my daughter who does not like bullfights.

Jan Johnsson