There is nothing wrong with the Primal Principle.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition

What's Wrong With Psychiatry?

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My comment:

There is nothing wrong with the Primal Principle.

I like your idea to talk to the patient and not to drug him but patiently delving into his or her past and to listen instead of rushing through too many patients a day. I have communicated with patients during a couple of months, and they are certainly not impressed by the approach from the Primal Center. Their criticism about PT is much harsher than your condemnation of the insensitive treatment that patients, being neglected, abandoned and unloved, encounter in the psychotherapeutic world, in general.

If a patient after having been attached to the Primal Center for 5 years, having spent 60.000 $ alone on therapy fees and private sessions, are going back to UK in a much worse condition than she arrived, then I can understand that she is feeling “fucked over” by PT. Honestly Art, I feel ashamed of two opposite reasons: 

A. She is only one in a number of disappointed patients I know of, who have been victims of your naive negligence to overlook a fundamental need to provide comprehensive counseling. It was, from the Primal Center’s side, a lack of human understanding / maturity to unleash a neurotic 26 year old in the LA-jungle and let her be seduced, both mentally and physically. This was done under the pretense of curing her anxiety neurosis and birth primals, and you made her uncritically accept to consume her savings on sessions so that she had to return back home penniless.

  

B. I, myself, had tremendous luck with both you (how you i.e., over decades, communicated the Primal Principle) and my general background, which allowed me, to do things “my way” because I was professionaly trained to handle complex and critical situations all by my self. That have mislead a few who did not realize “my way” was much more qualified and holistic than what they were able / willing to recognize.

In a reply, May 16th, 2013, to a comment you summarized Primal Therapy as a potential lifelong treatment: “I used to think it was an amazing discovery to cure people. But there is something that is hard to explain: the amount of unconscious pain we all carry within ourselves. The pain we consciously feel may not feel like it requires 40 years of therapy, but that is because we don't feel the unconscious part that is much greater. And the more you feel in therapy, the deeper you go, the more you uncover the unconscious pain, the more you realize the intensity and amount of what you were carrying.
Therapy can only follow each individual natural rhythm and what their body can take out, one piece at a time. So, in fact, I don't want to sound pessimistic, but people with massive early trauma may not have enough of a life time to resolve it entirely, even with Primal Therapy. However it is still better to take it out, one piece at a time, and live a better life day after day. And I agree with you, healthy diet, exercise, all these other tools we can find can definitely help greatly too.
As Primal therapists, we are charged with taking the pain out. We never put it in, someone else did. Art Janov”

This summary is the way I interpret the Primal Principle. What’s wrong with “laying back, once in a while, and feeling the stab of anxiety” and afterwards feel OK and function? The mind for sure will remind me next time when a memory has triggered the remnants of old not yet fully lived pain / traumas.

The best thing about the Primal Principle occurs when we have learned to use it properly.

Jan Johnsson