Janov's Reflection on The Death of Steve Jobs

Friday, October 7, 2011

The Death of Steve Jobs

Steve Jobs has died and we lost a giant who changed the world literally. But I ask myself why did he develop cancer at such a young age? And I want to add my thoughts to this question, with the understanding that it is at best guesswork. It is a guess based on years of experience with patients, over sixty years, now, added to a great deal of current research.

Steve was an unwanted child. What does that say? That the mother was having trouble could not take care of him and had no prospect of being a mother to him throughout his life. He was given up for adoption. But in those nine critical months while in the womb there is a tale. And we know now that if a mother is depressed the offspring is also likely to have depressive tendencies. When the mother is anxious the stress hormone levels of the fetus/baby goes up and he too is under stress; not just a stress for the moment but a stress level that is higher than normal and creates havoc in the system. It is imprinted and remains a constant active memory. It requires that the system deal with it all of the time, and that means, inter alia, repression; a closing of the gates so that the pain remains sequestered. The repression is a serious, active force grinding down the system bit by bit, often unknown and unfelt until irreversible damage is done. Research today is full of information about very very early trauma and later cancer and heart disease.

It is my opinion that most of us untraumatized individuals remain fairly healthy throughout life. It takes a massive intrusion while we are just starting out in life before birth that warps the system and begins its toll. It is a stealthy enemy; a quiet, insidious menace that gnaws away month after month, year after year until the organ fails and disease begins its life. I am thinking that it happened to Steve Jobs because a healthy active nondrug taking human should ordinarily not fall so seriously ill so early in life. Of course, this is a guess and if I am proven wrong so be it; but I offer a proposal, a hypothesis, if you will, about what may have played into his disease. It is not an unreasonable assumption. And you know that even when there is no love and no loving figure to watch out for you in the first weeks and months of life the damage, heavy imprinted damage is there. Early it doesn’t take much to do it. And very early in life it can be only a matter of days or weeks with no parental figure that catastrophic illness gets its start. Needs are so intense in the womb and at birth, as well as the first weeks of life on earth. They must be fulfilled.

Otherwise the good seem to die young. So goodbye, Steve, you changed my world and you never knew me. But I am indebted to you for my life today. It is so tragic that you had so much to give and yet you may have been given so little to start your life. Life really is not fair because if there were someone up there judging good deeds and giving out rewards how could he or she have missed you.

Jan Johnssons comment:

We are many, with all our Apples-products, who are missing the image of Steve Jobs because we loved his ingenious, super-designed, well coordinated and sleek products which in so many ways are simplifying our lives and communication. However, very few did really know him.

Much of his doubtless genious, was probably a product of a neurotic, enlightened despot propelled by all the early imprinted pain which you with a fairly riksfree guess is assuming that he was exposed to.

We needed him as a visionary, as a designer, as the chief coordinator of the Apple concept and as the seductive marketing genius, and of course as a myth and a hero.

My guess is that his early death partly was the price he had to pay to create one of the greatest business successes in modern history. Evolution gave us, his admirer, a tremendous  compensation for his probably painful start which supposedly caused his too short journey in life.

Jan Johnsson