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Why Primal Therapy?
I read the Primal Scream 1974 in Danish (Primal Skriget) and it became instantly, with it’s “promise” to resolve repressed feelings, a core component of my obsession to tackle the causes of my epilepsy. Epilepsy I had developed 15 years earlier after a childhood / infancy marked by ADD and daydreams. Although I was a charming and well-liked child I was tortured badly from a thin and ugly hair, unlike my parents and three siblings who had strong and curly hair. My parents did not hide their delight at their beautiful hair which I interpreted as criticism of my own hair growth. To make things worse, with epileptic medication, my head became quickly bald and over the years, I developed a neurotic attraction to curly partners.
When I lived in LA in 1978 and 79, I brought a beautiful and curly blonde wife. My bald apparition, with repressed pain, I hid behind her radiant beautiful hair. I thought, then, that the wounds of my many years of suffering due to the bald head had cleared. With Yul Brynner’s, Kojaks and beautiful curly wives' help. How wrong! Below my defenses lurked the pain.
I have previously complained about the fact that my two years in LA with PT gave a meager yield. However, I had a Primal during a session with my therapist Patty after we had discussed my childhood. I felt sad and abandoned and my feelings moved to just after WW2. Suddenly I was pushed off my father's lap and my, 3 years younger, sister took my place and I saw her with her blonde curly hair hugging my father. My sister's hair was during my primal experience, 1946/47, blonde, while it in 1978 was very dark. Her blond childhood I had forgotten. This explained why I had always been obsessed by preferably blonde curls.
In a historic cavalcade my curly girlfriends slid past and my feeling, which I was overwhelmed by, explained to me that my curly acquaintances over the years had been my way to hide my hurt feelings and show my father and my sister that I could attract curly women. My curly hallucinatory parade of acquaintances ended suddenly with an enlarged photo of Art Janov from the Danish Primal Scream. My attraction of primal therapy meant not solely a therapeutical way to tackle my epilepsy, but also meant a neurotic attraction of Arts beautiful curly hair that reinforced my ambition to go to LA.
Two years after my primal about how my blonde sister dethroned me, I went to a retreat in Bern with a blond curly woman, a jazz singer from Copenhagen. We laughed and joked about my weakness for blonde women and after a successful retreat, where Art Janov and the woman was singing jazz together ("Must you be mean to me ...") so had my neuroses taken me from a life with one curly blonde woman to another. It cost me several more relationships before I come so far in my re-living traumatic birth experiences that, in old age, I approached the woman / childhood friend, with black straight hair, I realized early on should have been my friend in life if not my epilepsy / my neuroses led me astray.
When I was 6 years old in the first grade of elementary school, I had an old angry teacher. She quickly eliminated my desire for music and song, and she advised my mother that I sang as a "bass drum in the desert." I and many others have often laughed a lot at that statement, but on the inside I have, for 70 years, been crying. In my dreams, I often sang to myself like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and many of my hallucinatory / primal experiences, for a number of years, Hungarian gypsy music was an important component.
The fact that I've started playing tenor saxophone recently is something of a highlight of my life due to that a curly shrink with “transposition problems”, has guided me to re-live pain. Just like my shrink, I can now concentrate for long periods, I have all the time I need and therefore I look forward, one day, to be able to play along a Charlie Parker record. Being able to transpose or not.
Jan Johnsson
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