To the messenger.

My comments on Art Janov's Reflexions on  On Murder Again   (click to acccess)

I read a resignation, from a Primal Therapy point of view, when you with ever greater frequency are telling us that you are “only the messenger” who is around to tell us what happens if a mother and her husband don’t love each other and fight and subject the fetus to crazy diets, drinking and drug taking. Not to speak of many others, for example, those religious mothers who decide to follow the bible literally and give birth with Pain. Your resignation I interpret the following way: To develop a universal therapy to feel and reverse the evolution is working as a complete cure only in exceptional cases.

Of course, the messages to all future parents are the most important thing, now that we know all the consequences you are explaining so pedagogically in your books and Reflections. We will obviously continue to spread your announcement to the next generations, but, I am left with a bitter sweet taste after all I’ve been through to survive. You helped me to a new life, and it certainly is a sweet feeling to have demystified my epilepsy. The bitter feeling I am getting when I think about those having my kind of suffering / medical history. They will have nowhere to go, but the traditional treatment which, by all it’s ambitions, is a paraphrase of cognitive therapy helped by drug taking.

Let us hope for a worldwide revolution in childbearing so that the 9 months of pregnancy and the first few, developmentally critical years of life, occurs with unconditional love and maximum protection / care. The question, however, is if this is possible without, first, a new   representative, universal social revolution will be emplemented.

You stated from the start, decades ago, that one of the supporting pillars of the Primal Therapy is that it’s truly democratic in structure and function. I personally experienced the Primal Therapy as a therapy with rules, but democratic. It was / is a therapy with true democratic ambitions surrounded and influenced by a world of democratic dictatorships. 

Jan Johnsson

Arthur Janov

Jan, I think Primal is truly democratic. We do not dictate to patients; they tell us. Our relationships is that of equals, not bigshot and underling. We don't contend to know what is inside patients and we don't have a secret language special to us. art