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Why I Write and Reflect.
I started writing;
To develop/improve my ability to put into words/describe/narrate an experimentally, subjectively, perceived primal experience. The writing has mainly dealt with how I have re-lived imprinted pain from a deliberately caused, birth trauma.
In order to maintain verbal contact with my guide and friend, Art Janov, in the Primal Principle.
To document / distribute my experiences / opinions to those who may be interested in it. They would thus get inspired by following, for instance, The Primal Principle, to eventually experience a relief from their inner filter caused by repressed pain. That is dissolving the neurosis that, too often, distort our true needs.
Because, in pace with re-living pain and dissolving neuroses, my writing led to a growing search for complementary knowledge / truth from research and other individual perceived practical experiences.
And I could not stop when I, acting as a guide in a personal relationship with an experienced and respected female researcher and naturalist, experienced her dramatic improvement (cure). The cure evolved with the help of applying holistic experiences from The Primal Principle, Rolfing, nutrition, and not least by my providing advice.
Trivialization and denial of individual dynamic psychotherapy experiences.
For almost 40 years, my experience of re-lived pain and dissolved neuroses never had anyone, in my environment interested in what so obviously has changed me. (That including my attending neurologist in 6 advanced industrial countries!) All respectfully kept silent (no open criticism) and continued to repress their apparent anxiety. (Art Janov has incidentally, in a Reflection, testified that he too has never been approached by a psychologist in psychotherapy, who wished to share his experiences.)
How can we explain this trivialization or denial of experimental, changing experiences? The closest I have come to an explanation is that the traditional, deeply security based, opinion among researchers and analysts rests upon the assumption that one studies classes, groups or things, not single things. This inhibition is a view that, slowly, is becoming confirmed within the classical impersonal, similarity-seeking science. The main business of classical science is generalization, abstracting what is common to all. The authors, of orthodox scientific textbooks of physics and chemistry, study classes of things, or interchangeable objects. Today there is almost no space to accept the individual, holistically perceived experiences that could lead to more knowledge of the human person.
However, it is not only a question of extending the classical impersonal science to include individual human-oriented science. A complicating factor is whether the researcher’s ambition is healthy or unhealthy, either neurotically defense-motivated or healthily growth-motivated. Science can be a journey to full self-actualization, but it can also be a neurotic defence.
As an example of my search for complementary skills, I want to present extracts from an article in SCIENCE of March 20, 2015, “Metabolic Control of Epilepsy”, by Helen E Scharfman:
“It has been assumed that anticonvulsant or antiepileptic drugs, now called antiseizure drugs (ADSs), act on the underpinnings of nerve cell firing. However, as epilepsy research has matured, our understanding of ASDs has also. A report of this issue exemplifies this trend. The study raises a surprising question: Should the focal point of ASD development actually be neurons?
There is now considerable evidence that inexcitable elements of the central nervous system, such as astrocytes, the vasculature, and the immune system, play a far greater role than first thought. The observations point to epilepsy as a disease of energy metabolism rather than neuronal discharge, a strong shift in the neurocentric view of epilepsy. Epilepsy might be considered a type of diabetes, as has been suggested for Alzheimer’s disease, sometimes named “type 3” diabetes. In epilepsy, lowering circulating glucose concentration could be therapeutic.”
For me, who have combined The Primal Principle with Rolfing, homeopathy and nutritional experiments, the new research findings feel familiar. When I lived in Beverly Hills, LA, 1978/79, I bought and read homeopathic books, which regarded epilepsy as a type of diabetes. Sometimes, if not often, evolution requires enough lead time in order to get a breakthrough.
Jan Johnsson
