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After quite some time having been worrying about the future of the Primal Therapy and its universal establishment (- just as I spent time and energy on understanding, demystifying and curing my epilepsy or to select a different metaphor; just as I was neurotically acting out my childhood grief over my mother's helplessness, solving other people’s - often women’s - problems -) I've slid into a period when I read more than usual. This is partly because I can better imagine / understand and know the meaning of what repressed needs, such as lack of love and care, at an early critical stage of life can lead to.
It has been an as well exciting and dramatic as romantic and tragic reading that in temporal terms spanned 150 years. Besides that I regularly skimmed the everyday harsh realities in the world press, I have for the past two months read "The Old Man and The Sea" by Hemingway, "Lord Jim" by Joseph Conrad, "Skipping Steps" by Frank (Via Janov's Reflections), "To read Proust" by O. Lagercrantz and "Life Before Birth" by A. Janov.
To stop at perhaps the most difficult to melt, Marcel Proust, he was of French-Jewish ancestry and lived a short (51 years) life marked by illness. With unusual talent in an economically and culturally rich environment and with unique intellectual training during a dynamic period (1871-1922), he managed to convert his neuroses to the sublime art. His mothers refused “kiss and love" engraved de facto forever the asthmatic Proust. He turned this painful loss into sophisticated music, art, poetry, (homo) sexuality and religion in his writing in which he guides his readers through a pursuit of unattainable happiness. ("The refused kiss aroused an unreasonable demand in the boy's chest. He did not know why he was crying, but he could not do without the nutrients that the mother's kiss meant for his soul. Behind it, there was a reality that his mother could not give him.")
A prerequisite for my understanding and my enjoyment of the said literary work and not the least of its mediators and writers have been my own experience of Primal Therapy and my reading and the growing understanding of Art Janov’s books over 40 years. To understand the driving force of a pain-relieving neurosis, as a surrogate/painkiller for the initial lack of satisfaction of needs in terms of love and care. How our pain creates and manages our ways of living that we will never be masters of. On the contrary, these patterns of life are our masters and adds a (protective) filter over our world view. In any case, until we have sensed the underlying pain.
It is a deeply satisfying adventure to have been part of the experience, to understand what was hidden behind my fear and pain. Without this experience, I had never been able fully to understand what I've read. Evolution has provided us with a means of expression, which, among other things have the advantage that they make our suffering bearable, well, almost enjoyable, during long moments. A Primal Symphony in the Major key.
