Freud is Getting Off His High Horse.

During a few weeks, I have read Louis Cozolino’s books; “The Making Of A Therapist” and “The Neuroscience Of Psychotherapy.” Both have given in-depth insights into what I have experienced and learned during my almost 40 years in connection with Art Janov and his innovation The Primal Principle. I have experienced Cozolino’s message as a softer version of psychotherapy than Janov’s, but at the same time more instructive, informative and social in its pursuit. Immediate personal reactions in connection with my most intimate contacts have not been lacking, and I have experienced an improvement in my social interactions. As usual, my dreams have not been slow to act around my brain circuits and last night I had an extensive, pleasant dream of freeing character.

In the dream, I participated in a conference in a big city. Participants were people from different positions that I had met during my career as well as a few close friends from way back in time. The conference aimed to improve our general social skills, be honest and dissolve inhibiting repressions. I enjoyed not having to keep track of either time, belongings or documentation. I noticed that my keys disappeard, but it did not worry me (it turned out later that I had them inside my shirt), and my usual concern that travel documents would disappear was gone.

A young man who looked to be suffering from stress and anxiety came up to me, and I held him until he had re-lived a difficult repressed pain trauma. Afterwards, he looked relaxed and healthy, and I told him he did not need any therapy treatment because the feeling had cured him. A woman, to whom I had previously been married came up and expressed her admiration, in an emotional way, over my treatment of a young man.

After friendly but undramatic saying goodbye to a number of conference participants, I left without my previous fear of not finding my way home. I lay down on a giant skateboard deck and rolled, feet first, through a large city (probably L.A.) at breakneck speed and slid smoothly through many narrow passages without striking neither guardrails nor signs. Suddenly I rolled out of town and came to the countryside. The paved road turned into a dirt road and suddenly I had three horses with riders in front of me. I slowed down, and one of the riders stepped down from his horse. I immediately identified the rider as Sigmund Freud, and he took off his hat when I passed him. The two riders in Freud’s companion remained anonymous. My ability to roll forward on the gravelly horse road was limited and with this realization, I woke up and felt glad to have made Louis Cozolino’s literary, psychotherapeutic acquaintance.

Cozolino’s books make my experience and knowledge from Art Janov and Alice Miller complete. The three represents, for me, a complete psychotherapeutic ensemble, but whose individual perspectives I had not fully understood my birth trauma, my neuroses and my confused social relationships. Additionally, Art Janov gave me the courage and the will to penetrate the pain behind my trauma that eventually developed into epilepsy. However, despite all the words in their books, it is the wordless re-experience of the pain that makes the journey.

Art Janov has, for decades, harshly, criticized the tendency of cognitive therapists to repress the pain of their patients due to the fear of their own repressed pain. Instead of asking “WHY symptoms?”, they treat, these symptoms, by repressing, cognitively, the pain further down, over and again. Louis Cozolino realizes this danger and to develop the psycho-therapists’ ability, to in social interaction with patients and supervisors, cure themselves from the mental problems, that originally drove him, her to become a therapist / “caretaker.” “The brain is a social organ of adaptation built through interactions with others. There are no single human brains – brains only exist within networks of other brains.”  

My delight in Cozolino’s therapy training model works until my own stigma of epilepsy. I have a feeling that Louis Cozolino has set a severity / category boundary in his professional therapy ambitions. Fortunately, Janov, without being careless, has not drawn any limits, at least not any that stopped me. My own successful development reflected certainly my experiences of dramatic pain from my epileptic seizures.

Why does not Cozolino with a word mention Janov & The Primal Therapy? That is a question that demands an answer. He mentions Alice Miller, who I believe, is the one of the three who in a personal way, most empathy richly, describes the experience of pain from childhood traumas. She is unyielding in her demands to the patient’s liberation / removal from certain inhibitory family relationships, which have caused a trauma due to lack of care / love before, during and after birth. Her reference to the repressive role of religion (4th commandment) is a cultural and psychotherapeutic eye-opener. 

Louis Cozolino is probably looking for a wider audience than Arthur Janov. He will probably choose, according to Peter G. Prontzo’s review of his book in The Primal Mind, and according to Daniel Kahneman, to follow the model to avoiding (physical and mental) pain is a stronger motivation than the attraction of pleasure. “Based on the way our brains operate, evolution appears to have been far more interested in keeping us alive than making us happy.” Is it an “anti-evolutionary” attitude that keeps Art Janov / The Primal Principle outside neuroscience (research and education), health care and psychotherapeutic literature?

Jan Johnsson