Revised To-Do-List!

In my latest blog, “Evolution is Evolution and Psychotherapy is Psychotherapy”, I noted that it is the journey that matters, not the destination. True to my habits, I had the following night a dream of a long journey:

I was in a foreign country / culture and was lost and there was very few people around, who I could ask for help. Suddenly, I saw two different human-like figures of extraterrestrial character. First I was scared and wanted to flee away, but the beings friendly and sympathetic charisma made me stop and I started to communicate with them. We used no words, but they made me understand what path I should choose, and they both suffered because they seemed to know that I had a long walk in front of me. I said goodbye to these different but beautiful souls and touched them and started my trek against my distant goal. I had a distinct feeling that I was on an endless journey between Boulder, Colorado and Santa Monica, California. When I realized how much, in my usual life, I would miss and not have time for, I started to cry. It was, however, liberating tears even if my whole body ached. Then I woke up.

When I, today, read Art Janov’s Reflection “Can We Learn to Love?”, the two loving souls in my dream appeared in my mind as clearly as if I had actually met them during the night. And of course I had! The two beautiful beings with their kindness, their generosity and their demonstrated interest were Art Janov and Ida Rolf! With them I did not have to worry about intellectual psychological symptoms analysis or theoretical casualties. Both realized that behind my epilepsy, I had a hidden nasty trauma that made my life a humiliating hell. They promised nothing more than, to the best of their abilities, to support my liberation of my repressed feelings, each according to her / his speciality in body and mind.

Art’s exposition, of why it is not possible to learn to love, raises many and contradictory feelings. In order not to neglect my life experiences, I created, as a self-defence, a number of counter-questions;

Could a complex and increasingly intellectual world exist without love? Could a world with limited resources allow medication and therapy to be free? Could a physically and emotionally healthy person be motivated to become a Primal Therapist?, etc., etc., ad infinitum. Without being able to answer these and other questions in an unequal, complex, slow and simultaneously explosive world, it is, however, easy to admit that I always have been at my best when I have met kindness and love. In addition, my person has grown and my feelings rejoiced when I, though not as often as I would have liked, had the ability to display the same natural attitudes of friendliness, generosity and interest towards others.

In Art’s “nope”, to answer if we could learn to love, there is, unfortunately, in fact a pessimistic message to the dominant part of the world’s population and will Evolution allow an understanding of nuance coupled with scientific understanding into one therapeutic perspective?

Jan Johnsson