To Open Pandoras Box And To Free The Hope.

To Open Pandoras Box And To Free The Hope.

As an apology and explanation why, during 47, years, it has proven more difficult than expected to cure massive early traumas, Art Janov says: “We never put in the pain, someone else did. As Primal Therapists we are charged with taking it out.” 

Then a logic question must be: Is it correct to charge your patients when you cannot take out what you promised to take out?

Primal Therapy (PT) often peels off layer after layer of repressed protections and filters, often without, successfully, being able to peel off / re-live considerable, unknown parts of the traumatic pain. PT opens the Pandoras Box and eliminates an important part of the, often leaking, protection which evolution created. PT is making the patients aware of their, often, unbearable pain, however, it has neither cured them nor fulfilled the hope and confidence that the patients dearly had put in the therapists hands, when they let them open their Pandoras Box!

In too many cases, The Primal Therapy has been a painkiller, a hope. Like drugs, cigarettes, sugar, sex and other neurotic behavior, PT has helped the patients act out their hope. Simultaneously they realize that they are over-taxing their minds and organisms, which abuse eventually is bound to take its toll. When a certain treatment time, short or long and often misjudged, has expired, and resources are becoming scarcer, the patients are often caught in no man’s land in a situation where no advice is offered and where money, family, work, anxiety, depressions and neurotic behaviours etc., in a complex mixture, are inhibiting factors. The practical solution often leads to the traditional psycho-pharmaceutical rat race.

Too many of the patients have been blind for the risks. However, propelled by their pain, the dream of the final cure became neurotic and worked in the same way as a religious obsession. That’s why I once used the aphorism that Art Janov is the, psychotherapeutic, one-eyed King in the Kingdom of the blind!

The Primal Therapy with its psychotherapeutic approach has a tendency, contrary to its origin, to lean to the intellectual branches of Neuroscience which is more and more dominated by the pharmaceutical industry. If that could be changed, Rolfing, as a natural therapy developing physical balance guided by the principle that the body has to be in balance with gravity, could form a natural partnership with the Primal Therapy. 

Primal Therapy (the Primal Principles) could explain and bring a new level to many of the amazing psychological changes that appear, often unexpectedly, in Rolfed individuals. For that to happen an intellectual iron curtain, that prevents free exchange of ideas, must be teared down. As in politics a new generation of leaders, dominated by a new set of habits and unconscious pain, is necessary.

“Hope is the last thing to die.”

Jan Johnsson