A Collective Dynamic Therapist

To Art Janov,

I agree with some of your concern about the back up given to cognitive psychotherapy by your famous Jewish-American compatriot Eric R. Kandel. Like many, Nobel Prize awarded, scientists even this multifaceted superspecialist in short and long term memories suffers a slight bout of megalomania. He gets, apparently propelled by his selling name, with ease, an article printed in the NYT about “The New Science of Mind / http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/opinion/sunday/the-new-science-of-mind.html?_r=0 ”. He seems to suggest, theoretical, cognitive applications without, seemingly, having an extensive own practical psychotherapeutic background, at least not one, which is on par with his, awarded, technical specialities.

I wish you had responded to Eric Kandel’s fourth comment about the biology of mental disorders; “the effects of psychotherapy can be studied empirically”. “Aaron Beck, who pioneered the use of cognitive behavioral therapy, long insisted that psychotherapy has an empirical basis that it is a science. Other forms of psychotherapy have been slower to move in this direction, in part because a number of psychotherapists believed that human behavior is too difficult to study in scientific terms”. I have since 1980 heard and read about your plans and ambitions to make scientific research and studies of Primal Therapy. However, the output that has leaked out has been borrowed from various research papers, and they have been interpreted through conclusions based on a limited number of heterogeneous patients with a dubious long-term value.

Unfortunately, feelings have a lot in common with a mirage. Both are real phenomena, but they have a tendency to dissolve under changing conditions and not allow themselves to be caught. However, I sympathize with your desire; “to bring the emotional and mental into the equation”. I have experienced how mental and emotional provocations have initiated lasting, detectable physical changes in my brain and body in a mindful way.

In 2008, Eric Kandel and Daniella Pollak discovered that it was possible to condition mice to associate a specific noise with protection from harm; a behavior called “learned safety”, which produced an internal behavioral antidepressant effect comparable to medication. So Eric Kandel might after all introduce interesting novelties into his version of psychotherapy and new science of mind.

Eric Kandel as a collective dynamic therapist

Finally, I want to give an excerpt from Wikipedia to show that Eric Kandel has an intuitive feeling for re-living tremendous, collective, imprinted pain:

“When Kandel won the Nobel Prize in 2000, it was claimed in Vienna that he was an "Austrian" Nobel. He said it was "...certainly not an Austrian Nobel, it was a Jewish-American Nobel." After that, he got a call from then Austrian president Thomas Klestil asking him, "How can we make things right?" Kandel said that first, Doktor-Karl Lueger-Ring should be renamed; (Karl Lueger was an anti-Semitic mayor of Vienna, cited by Hitler in Mein Kampf) Second, he wanted the Jewish intellectual community to be brought back to Vienna, with scholarships for Jewish students and researchers. He also proposed to have a symposium on the response of Austria to National Socialism.”

Kandel has since accepted an honorary citizenship of Vienna and participates in the academic and cultural life of his native city. His book from 2012, “ The age of insight”, has a subtitle “The quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, Mind and Brain from Vienna 1900 to the Present”.

Jan Johnsson