Customer/Patient is King

Customer/Patient is King

I have for many years participated in the chorus of critics of Cognitive Therapy, but it has had no appreciable effect. Our subjective arguments, presented by way of verbal stories about how early imprinted and repressed pain has been re-lived, has been of little use.

The Cognitive therapist corps has continued to grow and has officially >135.000 registered members. Although their efforts are short-term, constantly reiterated, treatment of symptoms, our critical voices have had the same effect as a piss in the Pacific. As in, for example, consumer goods sales, the cognitive shrinks supply what patients want and think will help them. Our big problem is that in matters of mental illness (with 60 million patients in varying degrees dependent on drugs only in the US), there is no consumer information / education regarding Primal Therapy. Information which can reach different types of customers with the necessary enlightenment on possible opportunities to be cured of repressed mental pain. In the meantime, we continue to criticize the old treatment monopoly and its practitioners.

In order to break its self-imposed isolation, the Primal Therapy must find ways efficiently to communicate the potential of its principles, when correctly implemented. Criticizing different social systems, and the current treatment paradigm obviously leads nowhere, which only reinforces our knowledge of how human neuroses works.

The Primal management both want to socialize the current establishment (to get scientific acceptance of the effects of the “revolutionary” Primal principals) and criticize its successful development of treatments of symptoms. 

Because of, for whatever reason, avoiding to use modern marketing, PT thus waived to reach and help a larger patient base which ultimately could have given access to resources which could have been beneficial for PT’s unique ideas. This sympathetic but inhibitory stance has removed the inherent dynamic vigor which PT once gave such an enthusiastic promise of in the sign of (r)evolution.

The great thing with “The Primal Scream” was that, in the book, the patient / customer was The King! There was in the book a natural built-in marketing dynamic that spoke to the patients / clients. Following a flying start, and without being able to control the development, whether from an administrative or treatment standpoint, eventually the patient / customer focus dissolved and primal “technology” took the upper hand. The Patient was no longer The King even though the Primal Therapy treatment principles requires it. Parallels in all kinds of business are countless, and many ups and downs, which has delayed development, have occurred.

The Patient is The King, and he decides whether he wants, for example, Cognitive Therapy or Prima Therapy. PT has to do its homework and communicate to the Patients why Primal Therapy and how it best may cure them. The patient decides which of the different therapies is the best for him.

Jan Johnsson