Reflections on Leadership In The Psychotherapies.

The Idea / the embryo of The Primal Therapy was born in the 1960-is in New York by, the then young, avant-garde and “destruction” artist, Raphael Ortiz. He drew the audience’s attention to the links between art, history, human development / evolution / rituals and connections between mind, body and spirit. At one performance attended the young man, who later at a therapy session with Art Janov, re-lived the first documented primal. On Janov’s request, the young man / patient repeated that which occurred during Ortiz’s seance. The young man’s re-lived feelings became the source of Art Janov’s innovation; The Primal Therapy, which spread like wildfire across the world through the bestseller “The Primal Scream.”

Ph.D. Arthur Janov, with a classic psychologist / therapist background, took care, skilfully, of Ortiz’s intuitive leadership vision of our potential to develop the mind, body and spirit. A curiosity, bordering on a demand, to get answers to WHY the psychosomatic symptoms occur, with which doctors and psychologists diagnose their patients, was one of Janov’s strongest, stated, incentives. The Primal Therapy became all too hastily a fashion trend that promised “quick fixes” and the therapy was quickly adopted by, more or less serious, therapists and psychologists. Many dilettantes / mock therapists caused, for lack of leadership and management, more harm than good in the healthcare sector where short-term solutions, in the initial phase, are valued too highly, not least by the patients themselves.

Lack of visionary leadership in the staff of The Primal Center has curbed Art Janov’s ambitions firmly to establish a coordinated Primal Therapy as an accepted psychotherapy and, despite innovative methods and, seemingly, well-documented patient experiences, become a serious alternative to the prevailing psychotherapeutic paradigm; CBT (cognitive behavioral therapy). Cognitive therapy is bureaucratically micromanaged and lacks, like PT, visionary leadership. By tradition and routine, CBT dominates research, education and health care and has a strong economic interdependence with Big Pharma. Janov’s skill as a psychologist, guide and an interdisciplinary author had, early on, had to be influenced by visionary leadership to develop, in partnership with other innovative partners, the potential inherent in the Primal Principle.

There are no visible leaders to take over from Art Janov, which is especially sad because research in different areas of the multifaceted Neuroscience is now beginning to prove a number of answers WHY? different symptoms, such as Alzheimer, cancer, depression, distorted vital signs etc., etc., are connected to repressed birth and childhood traumas. Simultaneously, other sectors of society, outside the health-care and psychotherapy, acquire knowledge, like Janov from Neuroscience. The authors behind “Primal Leadership” and “Conversational Intelligence” have applied this type of emerging modern science.

I believe that America’s 200.000 shrinks would be several levels better, relatively quickly if they dared to introduce / test Daniel Goleman’s “Primal Leadership” and Ruth Glaser’s “Conversation Intelligence”. Questioning diagnosed symptoms and seeking an answer to WHY? would change and modernize / democratize their working methods. Thinning out the high doses of medications and bureaucratic management, with its official manuals, would meet the latent need of 60 million consumers (in the U.S. alone) of psychotropic drugs.

If 200.000 shrinks embraced the above vision of the future, millions of leaders in business and administration could hopefulle simultaneously be stimulated to ask to be introduced to the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse in order to gain a deeper understanding of emotions, depressions, neurosis (and their causes) of their fellow employees.

According to a Daniel Goleman article in HBR; “what most influences our operations bottom-line performance: it’s leaders mood and state-of-mind or emotions.”

The statement could be applied everywhere where people have influence over others; in homes, schools, associations, politics etc., ect..

Jan Johnsson

Primal Leadership.

No, the title “Primal Leadership” is not directly retrieved from Art Janov’s Primal Therapy, but from an article (“Primal Leadership - The Hidden Driver Of  Great Performance”) by David Goleman, R. Boyatzis, and A. McKee. The article is included in the book “HBR’s 10 Must Reads On Managing Yourself.” It was the same Daniel Goleman who with his bestseller “Emotional Intelligence - Why it can matter more than IQ,” made the term Emotional Intelligence widely-known.

The reasons for my reflections on leadership and management, in two areas, seemingly, as diverse as psychotherapy and change-consulting, are because I, virtually simultaneously, was active in niches of the two. After having re-read parts of Daniel Goleman, Peter Drucker and and others, and opened my eyes to Judith Glaser’s “Conversational Intelligence” and her sympathetic approaches, I realize how the experiences and conclusions of the mentioned specialists have significant similarities with the psychotherapeutic innovation; the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse. Art Janov guided me through his revolutionary psychotherapy while I took care of my career, which involved both leadership, management and change-consulting.

My years in the business world taught me to distinguish between the basic characteristics, attitudes and responsibilities of leaders and managers. Leadership is based on, with a credible style of leadership, establish visions and communicate them to (and together with) the company’s employees in an engaging long-term way. Thus, it is the leader’s responsibility to keep the vision and business concept alive, and continually to train and educate new employees who can take over his / her leadership-role. A gifted leader should have ambitions to make him / herself redundant and move on to new tasks. It becomes management’s task to develop products, employees, technologies, markets and financal resources if the leader sets up and communicates stimulating visions. When leadership, for various reasons, stops working, the company becomes quickly over-managed and competitors and / or new paradigms outpaces it. 

According to Robert S. Kaplan’s HBR-article “What To Ask The Person In The Mirror,” a good leader has most certainly early in his / her career, received guidance and support. He / she were closely monitored, coached and mentored. Gradually, as his / her career took off, valuable and honest feedback became rarer, and finally he / she acted largely on their own. The daily behavior is then no longer given much consideration. Therefore, he / she must regularly ask themselves: “What is my vision and my priorities?”, “How do I communicate?”, “How do I use my time in relation to my priorities?”, “Do I give my employees meaningful feedback?” and “How do I behave under pressure?”.

Early in my career I was fortunate to work with a modern, natural leader, B.J..

He promoted me from a management position of predominantly routine nature to help build and develop a new sales and marketing organization on a national level. Within the vision B.J. outlined, I got progessively greater freedom in accordance with my personality to develop a modern organization without ever being exposed to micromanagement. A tansparent discussion during the project developed both me and the organization. This “Primal Management”, advanced for its time (the late 1960-is), which was mediated by B.J., I could benefit from during 30 years in three Swedish groups with international operations. B.J. got me, both practically and theoretically, to understand the importance of having leaders who inspire instead of managers who control.

Controlling management was too dominant in those groups in which I later collaborated. That managementstyle resulted in that many business ideas were worn simultaneously with employees. The subsequent crisis opened opportunities for me to develop a career as a change / crisis consultant, which often meant to establish a short term leadership, contribute to taking the company out of its crisis, hiring and mentoring a new long-term successor  / leader and move on to the next mission. The role as a change-consultant, with relatively short engagements, fit my life-pattern and my personality profile and gave me the opportunity, simultaneously, to be engaged in Art Janov’s psychotherapy / The Primal Principle and to free me from the epileptic stigma being created by birthtrauma.

“Depressed, ruthless bosses create toxic organizations filled with negative underachievers. So the answer, what most influences the success of an enterprise, will both surprice you and make perfect sense: The leaders own mood. New research shows that a leader’s emotional style also drives everyone else’s moods and behaviors - through a neurological process called mood contagion.”  - Daniel Goleman

Jan Johnsson

THANKS FOR THE MEMORY.

“THANKS FOR THE MEMORY”

In a wonderful little book, “I would love to seduce you, but I’m too weak,” a writer, Margareta Strömstedt develops, ingeniously, memories from a long life in the center of attention. She does it through memories of her dead friend and fellow author Astrid Lindgren (“Pippi Longstocking,” “Karlsson-on-the-Roof”, “The Brothers Lionheart” and “The Children of Noisy Village” etc..). Astrid Lindgren’s books are all, invariably, about being ready to defend the weak and vulnerable in our harsh adult society. “The establishment, in each moment, should be prepared to make a revolution on the mental level, when the mind is about to freeze, let us be called back by the child within us - back to the imagination and creativity, to the vivid sensations and to the bold changes of thoughts and experiments.”

Margareta Strömstedt shows, through examples from her long life, how the universes of the child and an adult have affected her in different stages as a child, woman, wife, writer and human being, etc. and with warmth, love, tragedy, rage and pain taken from her personal experiences, she stimulates skillfully endless memory clusters in my life. She makes me feel lucky to have experienced the Evolution in Reverse and had the opportunity to re-live my earliest trauma / pain and to have obtained improved access to my memories.

The memories of the many people and situations I have encountered, the hundreds of books I have read, and the successes and failures I have experienced do not always remain in their original memory version. However, when pain, neuroses and traumas no longer inhibits my memory, I retain the feelings from my accumulated experiences as an accessible wisdom that enriches my daily life.

Music and especial jazz music is one of the memory connections from which I now have much pleasure. Many memories in my life, including in my dreams, have musical ties. Often when I write about or to someone, a classic jazz tune runs out in my memory. This ability has been specifically developed over the last 10-15 years since I freed myself from my epileptic stigma and my chemical lobotomy and become freer. For me, this was a surprising “bottom-up” communication of memories that I thought reserved for “musically gifted people.” With jazz-musical-poetry life becomes complete when words are not enough. 

My experiences with the Primal Principle (in combination with natural support of physiotherapy / Rolfing) has in recent years received an unexpected setting. It is due to the contact I established with the woman, who when she was a girl made a deep impression on my memory during adolescence. The memory explosion that occurred during the first hours of our contact after 53 years can best be compared to a simultaneous series of intense thunderstorms when the whole sky is full of lightning. We are still, after 3 years, daily engaged in interpreting and seeing life from three perspectives; 1. Our first 18 years of life. 2. 53 years of our very different careers. 3. From 2011 onward. To interpret ourselves, the environment, books and articles under safe conditions are developing. We destroy prejudices and inhibitions and in matters concerning interpretations of symptoms; The Primal Principle is often the watershed.

Another stimulating world of memories is growing strong. Memories of my 40 years in the PT and just as many years in a parallel career as a change expert and manager, matures suddenly. Both careers have had the same incentives; to help, more or less, traumatized, deranged organizations and individuals to function again. I developed, eventually, a good understanding of both of these worlds, and I acted successfully in niches of them. Combining the two, fully, did not, for various reasons enter my mind. Now, however, with a better perspective on life and through the ongoing development in modern change-consulting, I see apparent “interdisciplinary” combinations. It cannot reasonably be easier than that each organization and its services consists of individuals. With memories. So I will be back with comments while I still have the strength to seduce....

RE-VOLUTION  =  ROLL BACK TO THE ORIGIN!

RE-VOLUTION  =  MAKE ME LIVING AGAIN!

Jan Johnsson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQqobtZWjWM

The Intelligence Of Falling In Love.

I fall in love easily; the oxytocin then flows, life is easy, and my imagination picks up feelings and ideas, “bottom up” from my subconscious. The arrogance is lurking and exposes the equilibrium, in the everyday trivialities, to the test. However, the evolutionary intelligence, as always, has provided me with an excellent moderator. It is my young daughter, who often takes me out of my escapes from reality and shows how crazy my opinion, from another era, is when applied to the situation her generation is experiencing. My, as I rate them, democratic values, become quickly, in her eyes, dictatorial. She has exchanged three emails with different continents before I have formulated a sentence in a blog text. Our view, today, of the retiring and incoming king of Spain, showed very clearly how the different generations may manifest their sympathies.

A small minority of my relations have been long standing since they have been sufficiently answered / trusting. My mother, my childhood friend Eva, my boss  / mentor / pal Bert, my shrink and guide Art Janov and my daughter Isabel, fall into this category. Many other relationships, including my two first children, have been intense and relatively short-lived, often because mine and the other parties’s neuroses and / or valuations have been more Me-oriented than We-oriented. Most of these short-term love affairs have mostly  left great memories that sometimes pop up when the oxytocin production requires an injection.

A few days ago I wrote about a new “love”; “Conversational Intelligence”! In this case, it was the leitmotif of the book - a three-step unconditional development / collaboration model - and not the author, Judith E. Glaser, with who I fell in love. The model met a latent need I had for two - roughly parallel - 40-year careers as a manager (with changes / crisis as a speciality) and as a psychotherapeutic patient. The need, which Glaser intend to meet, can best be expressed in the potential of verbalizing / visualizing a new form of transparent cooperation / trust. What we can understand and verbalize, that can then be communicated into conversational intelligence.

Will Judith E. Glaser’s change- and collaboration-model survive in the long term? If I draw parallels with the therapy based on The Primal Principle, which Art Janov innovated, I believe that both the model and my delight are permanent. This belief I base in the fact that the model is built on Judith’s insights from a personally experienced need for change in a neurotic imprinted upbringing. It has many similarities with my primal therapeutic experiences. Furthermore, Judith’s model arrives in a generational transition between the new transparent and the old non-transparent democracy that permeates all sectors of all societies on every continent. Digital technology has taken democracy a step further, and an impatient growing proportion of the world is tired of the power struggle, corruption, lack of trust and fairness.

The risk with the Glaser-innovation, as I see it, is that many are quickly becoming carried away and see opportunities for a quick fix with something that by nature is very complex. That happened to Art Janov’s Primal Therapy, which, over time, proved to be a therapy / change / cure in the long run; from several years to a life-long treatment, all proportionate to the nature of the trauma / problem / crisis and how long they had lasted.

To show how important I think the “Conversational Intelligence” is, I have inspired my almost 20 year old daughter to read it and in her future career in business encourage its use. That will, in conjunction with Art Janovs information of the need to raise children with unconditional love, care and attention, give us hope for the future and less difficult traumas to cure, privately and in our jobs.

Jan Johnsson

"Conversational Intelligence".

During a few years, I have let my feelings and experiences related to Evolution in Reverse be reflected in my blogs. Often, my inspirations are taken from Art Janov’s Reflections in combination with emotions - “down up” in the brain - that has been triggered by the current situation or of a dream. In addition, authors like Marcel Proust, Simone de Beauvoir, Alice Miller, Malcolm Gladwell, Georg Klein, etc. have stimulated my thoughts and feelings about what is happening in my body and brain.

Because I, in my career, worked as a leader and consultant in a number of commercial and industrial enterprises / groups and I had a special focus on crisis and changes, I have, out of curiosity, continued to deepen my knowledge in this area. Then I have obviously been heavily influenced by my experiences from the Primal Principle and the knowledge that Art Janov passed on, about psychotherapy, psychology and neurology, most of which he collected from his patients’ experiences and research reports in Neuroscience.

In recent months, I have thought about the similarities and differences in the success of the methods within my therapy treatment and my professional career. They are seemingly two separate worlds. However, it is, in both cases, fundamentally about people, relationships, trust, security, hormones, oxytocin, abilities, ambitions, shelter and food for the day. There ought thus be infinite connections / similarities between the practices which the business sector (CEOs, managers, change consultants, etc.) and the therapy institutes - like The Primal Center - (therapists, psychologists and psychiatrists, etc.) are using. Both worlds aim to solve / cure personal and / or organizational crises and create a safe, caring and trusting environment. This approach has been reinforced by my history, where I managed to combine a role as a successful CEO and change consultant while simultaneously successfully undergo psychotherapy and physiotherapy treatments. This took place over many years, and I was lucky enough to rid me both of my neuroses and my epileptic stigma.

Timidly, I have on a few occasions asked Art Janov to develop his therapy organization and his responsibility. That way, he might have succeeded to break the isolation and doubt which the therapeutic / educational / research authorities are having regarding the value of the Primal Therapy as a curative therapy. My, in vain, rendered comments have, as a start, dealt with questions about counseling, etc. and initiation of collaboration with other natural therapies. Later I suggested doing a consulting project on a voluntary basis in order to develop a more transparent and trust-based patient / therapist relationship, but, unfortunately, without success...

I have found it difficult to visualize and verbalize the introspective self-sufficiency of Janov’s Primal Therapy. This incapacity occurred despite the fact that I often as a manager / consultant, inspired by PT, had to resort / introduce unconventional methods that often focused on creating confidence when emotions, fears, old paradigms had created inhibitory deadlocks. I was intuitively better at practically dissolving a hormone-charged stalemate in a corporate organizational crisis and get groups of people to collaborate and get the oxytocin flowing than I was, intellectually, to understand inefficiencies in the development of PT as an internationally well-dispersed therapy.

Research in Neuroscience has, in recent years, accelerated extremely fast and with the help of modern resources and job aids (supercomputers, networks, MIR, etc. etc.) research reports have emerged which, according to Janov, show conclusive evidence for PT’s validity. I’ve found that skillful change / behavioral consultants have adopted the results of the aforementioned research in Neuroscience and have introduced change / development models that I had wished were available during my active years as a consultant / manager. Eg Dr. Judith E. Glaser wrote an excellent book on the subject called “Conversational Intelligence”. It is all about building a transparent emotional confidence according to a model that I have not previously experienced outside Dr. Janov’s Primal Principle. 

When doctors, psychologist and scientists present a symptom, Dr. Janov is often irritated that they avoid to asking the question “WHY?”. However, Dr. Glaser asks in her organizational analyzes constantly “WHY?”!! It is the leitmotif of her change at all levels down to the individual’s emotional arguments and reactions. Dr. Glaser works primarily with organizations that for various reasons stopped working. Her approach is to, as far as possible, dissolve fears, neuroses, negative interpretations, etc. so that political and / or power-based groups, change their behavior and develop each other emotionally equally and become WE-oriented, but that they still retain and improve their I-worth.

An important part of Primal Therapy has been to guide patients to develop their ability to establish a healthy communication between the brain regions. The development, this communication, creates an intelligence where emotion and intellect gets a comparable status. For the few with unlimited time and unlimited resources, to re-live imprinted pain, presumably this evolution takes place according to the Primal Principle by itself. With Judith Glaser’s “Conversational Intelligence” a model has been developed that has high potential to bring individuals, groups and organizations much faster in this direction. Allow me, cautiously, to suggest even groups in The Primal Therapy in this potential. It is fascinating to follow Judith Glasers change journey through a number of identified and sophisticated organizations that have undergone severe crises. They have managed to escape from hormone-fueled horror scenarios and turn themselves into oxytocin flowing successes with motivated individuals who act on a new, previously unknown transparent level.

Jan Johnsson

http://wn.com/conversational_intelligence_with_judith_e._glaser

Scientific Explanation of Evolution in Reverse.

Researchers at Yale University on their way, scientifically, to explain evolution in reverse. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140422113430.htm. http://news.yale.edu/2014/04/10/yale-researchers-search-earliest-roots-psychiatric-disorders.

Being a long term Primal Therapy patient / practitioner, I feel enthusiastic and am relieved about the identification of the molecular mechanism in the prenatal brain. Identifying this may help explain how cells go awry when exposed to certain environmental conditions. By identifying many risk factors, the researcher detected the gene that may be linked to neurological problems. “Different stressors may have different stress responses”. They examined risk factors specially involving epilepsy, ADHD, autism and schizophrenia. They expressed hope “to provide therapy in the future to reduce the risk and protect vulnerable cells”.

Having been involved during the development of Primal Therapy (from a “quick-fix” to the process of re-lived pain during years and decades) for nearly half a century, PT has, for me, developed through experience to a lifestyle, finally to become an identity. Through a series of extraordinary coincidences, I happened the intuitive genius of Art Janov. He realized in the late 1960s, unscientifically, how psychological and neurological contexts were rooted before, during and just after birth. With this background, he identified accurately the Primal Principle and defined Evolution in Reverse. In fact existed thus, already then, the new treatment paradigm that had the potential to take psychotherapy out of the deadlock that cognitive therapy has continued to create. However, it would take nearly five decades before the scientific world seems to have caught up with Art Janov.

It is easy both to understand and feel for Art Janov´s many disappointments and impatience when it comes to achieving recognition from official bodies for his ingenious innovation. Lack of recognition and attention from both the neurological, psychological and other related circuits, in several respects, hampered the development of Primal Therapy. Due to self-inflicted inexperience, the stagnation did not became smaller because of the questionable hip character that followed “The Primal Scream’s” best seller edition. In the eyes of too many, PT became a fashion therapy, often in the hands of inexperienced, fortune-seeking boobs that caused permanent damage.

As a patient, I have survived and have been given a new outlook on life thanks to Art Janov’s guidance. It used to feel difficult and incomprehensible that almost everyone in an international environment (who consider themselves intelligent, well-educated and experienced) are reluctant to the general value of my achievements and my documented stories about my Epileptic Journey. The journey has to all parts followed the Primal Principle and Evolution in Reverse.

The research results which have been presented by Yale now feels as natural to me as when I after 53 years met my soul mate from adolescence. Now I can talk about my experiences with someone who happens to have a natural feel for interpreting both research papers and bottom-up information in the brain. Our fellowship eliminates naturally the old inhibitions in our thoughts and behaviors.

The Primal Principle is our future as well as the future of research. And to all whom it may concern.

Jan Johnsson

Reply:

Dear Jan,

Thank you for your letter. 

This is a well thought out and well written piece.  

My best,

Dr. Arthur Janov

Our Indefatigable coordinator Is Dead!

Lionel is dead!

In his credulity, he fell victim to a jealous Pit Bull. His suffering was short. The loss of his contagious joy, of which he had plenty, sufficient for everyone, feels heavy. He is buried in his favorite spot among the orange trees in front of our house.

When our tears have dried, we see who can fill Lionels position. Without a dog, we cannot be.

The dog is man’s best friend. Lo mejor del hombre es el perro. Le meilleure de l’homme est le chien. Det bästa hos människan är hunden.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_rTICMVXQQ

Isabel and Jan