A Different Way Of Using A Chromatic Scale

 A Different Way Of Using A Chromatic Scale   

Since Eva had booked a return flight to Sweden today I started the morning with a 4-hour round trip drive to Alicante in glorious, Spanish, spring weather. After lunch and sunbathing in the patio and a fine mobile phone call with my daughter in Valencia, I used a couple of hours practicing scales and fingering my tenor sax. Meanwhile, the postman delivered Alice Miller's German version of "Banished Knowledge" / "Das verbannte Wissen". The book is in the original edition and contains the chapter (My Way To Myself / Mein Weg zu mir), which Alice Miller in the mid-90s deleted (http://www.primals.org/articles/amiller.html). The chapter is in part a song of praise to Arthur Janov and his ideas that we can re-live repressed traumas from our birth and early childhood. 

Alice Miller describes how she searched and how she, eventually, found the therapy support, according to primal therapy principles of a gifted therapist in Bern, Switzerland. However, a few years later Alice Miller found out that the therapist in question turned out to be a charlatan with no formal prerequisites to pursue such an advanced psychotherapeutic treatment. As Alice Miller also started to question Arthur Janov’s capacity to monitor the impact of the processes, that his ingenious discovery had the potential to launch, Alice Miller decided to no longer recommend primal therapy.

Since Eva had gone to Sweden, I had nobody to express my feelings to. I felt empty, tired and sad and I lay down to feel my stab of anxiety. After a few hours, I woke up in a hallucinatory state. On a monitor in my head, I saw a huge chromatic jazz scale with notes. Large silver bubbles (surely inspired by my new silver tenor sax), floated around below the lines of the treble staff. Each time a note was in line to be played, a silver bubble ascended, took the place of the note and opened dramatically as a flower. Several traumatic experiences of my later life, my youth, my childhood and my birth was played as the silver bubbles rose up. 

After what seemed like more than an hour of psychotherapy scale exercises, I felt relaxed and together and I sent grateful thoughts to Arthur Janov, Ida Rolf, and Alice Miller. They have individually and collectively given me the opportunities and skills to my both pleasant and painful scale exercise, which I hope will eventually become bebop for my own pleasure.

Jan Johnsson

An Asphalt Flower!

What Lingers On (Part 1/2)  (Click to access) 


 

An Asphalt Flower!

An interesting, but sad, reading about your childhood. Your disclosing about your personal history are adding up to a better understanding of your personal feelings in your Reflection “What A Waste”. However, I am confused and cannot understand how the ghetto could raise a feeling person, an innovator and a hall-of-Famer with an illiterate, insane mother and a rude, authoritarian father, who constantly indicated you were an idiot.  You are certainly a true 91-year-old asphalt flower. There must be an explication.

Sometime, somewhere, something good / lifesaving must have made an indelible impression since you during decades have been able to transcribe / translate your message of the importance of love to us who were lucky enough to meet and understand you. To be able to, counter current, work during a long life has required an excellent immune system,  good vital signs and a healthy lifestyle and a pain propelled dedication.

Do you have a clue of which factors in your earliest, most sensitive days made your mind resist your horrible childhood and upbringing?  Which imprinted positive, lifesaving, factors behind your imprinted traumas made you believe in / act out your need for love?

Jan

Replies

Arthur JanovApril 10, 2016 at 11:26 AM
Jan, Believe it or not, getting out of that nuthouse to go to war helped save me. Battles were dangerous and terrible but I could get sane in spite of the danger. art

Arthur JanovApril 10, 2016 at 11:28 AM
Jan   I have no idea how I made it through, and my wife also wonders too how I escaped and remained sane. It is a mystery to me.  One thing: my parents never cared about me and had no future plans for me so I stayed myself and did not try to be anything or anyone else.     I could not change in order to be loved because there just wasn't any.   Art      how are you doing?

Arthur JanovApril 10, 2016 at 11:33 AM
Your asphalt flower, ayayay. art

Art,

After 20 years, you escaped one madhouse, rescued by "the evolution" and this experience helped you through next madhouse, WW2. Your superiors in the US military, the Navy, had the good taste to try out / discover your obvious talent and you were offered academic studies in psychology. Strengthened by the new knowledge did you get to the cuckoo's nests, number three and four, Hackers Psychiatric Clinic and Brent Woods Neuropsychiatric Hospital. 

In 1967, you found out of evidence of how repressed memories and feelings, under the right conditions, can be re-lived. More than one of us owe our lives to this paradigm shift in psychotherapy in which you have spent 50 years acting out your early pain. Even at age 90, and thereafter, evolution has made you able to demethylate, re-live and feel your primal madhouse-traumas.

My own “madhouse” had no asphalt. It was an agricultural university dominated by repressed, well-educated professors, researchers, instructors, and administrators. Most families, for at least one of their members, had regular contacts with the asylums of those days. Instead of being insane, I, fortunately, developed epilepsy at 20, which resulted in that I developed an inner obsession to prioritize everything in my life to know why I had epilepsy. Your discovery became eventually my way.

After my first primal 1980, turning a grand mal seizure into re-living my birth trauma, I developed excellent qualities for a crisis consultant and business leader and I was asked to take on more jobs than I could handle. Those were fascinating years and I managed to make a living, become sane and healthy and can look back on life with satisfaction and gratitude. Lots of pain to re-live, but what a gain to finally feel and understand how my life was put together / changed.

Thank You so much! 

Jan