Ontogeny or Phylogeny?

Ontogeny or Phylogeny?

Being one of the stars himself, Arts view of fame and success as an ephemeral notion seems so right. I have been through it and studied it, over and over again in the fiction and in the psychological literature and in the world of art, yes, wherever there are people. We act out our pain, often propelled by the hope and temptation of fame and success. Mainly we fail, but since the pain does not go away we try again and again and again. It is certainly not only the stars in different segments and niches who suffer, it is a common pattern among all human beings around the globe. 

Art says:

“We thought that once we choose a profession and followed it and succeed at it, becoming an expert and well known, that would be fulfilling. We would feel like a success.  Wrong.  When we have a deep-rooted lack of love, rejection, indifference and missing touch early in our lives we cannot feel like a success.” 

Because Art has felt his pain, he can, fortunately, for those interested, allow himself to reveal that. Most people cannot, of whom some commit suicide. However, is not the neurotic process of  i.e. pursuing a profession / wishing to be successful, the way we interpret evolution?? To make us survive short term and to propel the species to make new, random, adjustments? 

Death is naturally programmed into our cells. The programming is provoked either we get too old or we wear out due to act outs propelled by repressed pain. Then a malnourished immune system can not cope. Especially if exposed to cancerous virus cells which like the terrorists sneaks into our cells, even into the cells of the immune system.

“Symbolic love has to be repeated over and over again because it cannot fulfill”. Yes, that is often a tragedy seen from the individuals, ontogenic point of view. Phylogenetically, mutation, migration, genetic drift and natural selection are the evolutionary conditions for the species. What a dilemma! We are at the same time part of the macroevolution and have a limited human life to live, love or suffer. 

Do not get me wrong. Arts hint of a life with unconditional love and fulfillment is a nice mirage. My basic interpretation of Art is that we can do much more to develop / show our feelings and human relations. Psychotherapy can, in the best case, only temporary affect evolution. Like his Hollywood stars, we will make do with time-limited experiences of fulfillment and, unfortunately, we have to face the consequences when the addictive act outs become our everyday life.

Jan Johnsson

Attempts at clarification of a catch-22

Art says he does not feel fulfilled now as he developed into a skilled, famous and experienced expert / specialist because he carries a perpetual pain since he never received love, touch and attention of his parents. However, his repressed pain developed energy. This pain propelled energy drove his ambitions / act outs, during a long life, to relieve other people's pain, to develop the Primal Principle and at the same time, mainly through his books and blogs, to serve as an educator / tutor and a widely loved expert.

If Art had received love, touch and attention had he developed a more satisfying life? We can only guess and imagine that it could have been so. What we learned is that the brilliant expert who helped / motivated many of us (through and beyond our pain) to a new and more satisfying life, he, Art, sits himself as the loser / the "Shithead" in his own game of life.

It feels unfair and the moral is that we must not become so blinded by the pain effects that we can not appreciate their evolutionary compensating properties. I wish Art a greater sensitivity to the love we radiate. It is meant to be felt as part of his Fulfilment.

Jan Johnsson

PS

Of course, my “attempt” is pain propelled, but certain parts of my pain I love!

How We Breathe Depends On Physical And Mental Memories.

How We Breathe Depends On Physical And Mental Memories.

My breathing, I have often touched on in my blogs over the years. It was dramatically disturbed / affected in the neurotic / conscious, protracted birth trauma caused by my mother. I was locked in the birth canal for 48 hours. Therefore, many of my act outs and subsequent therapeutic treatment experiences have come to focus on my breathing.

For several years, existed a repeated pattern, during my birth primal, that I fell into a deep anesthesia. This was aggravated gradually that I hyperventilated fiercely and suddenly not breathing at all. This condition lasted a good while and I struggled desperately to get air but without success. Suddenly, I gave up and felt myself drowning / dying. Consciousness returned weakly and slowly. I had been through a primal instead of an epileptic seizure. The feeling of anesthetic pressure released slowly. I experienced a total relief and liberation, first physically and shortly afterward emotionally. My breathing was relaxed and parasympathetic.

During more than 20 years, I made early each morning push-ups (2 x 125) at my fingertips with my feet on a table (my way of freediving). During each of the two pushup series, I held my breath. Besides Carbamazepine (Tegretol), these act outs were my way of keeping up my ego and reduce my anxiety of my problems and then especially the epileptic threat. I used my abdominal muscles in combination with my pushups to displace anxiety and tension associated with a stressful and demanding work career. This defense tied to my breathing, which I had developed over many years with great willpower and discipline, was certainly the heaviest reason that my two years at the Primal Institute in LA did not lead to faster visible results.

The physical defense, I felt instinctively and contacted the Rolfing Institute at my regular visits in Boulder, Col. In my files I still have the following statements by Ida Rolf:

“Physical individuality is shaped by the forces of life - how we were born, when we learned to move, our goals, experiences, accidents, mental and emotional sets. All of these leave a record in our mental and our physical memories. The two are in many ways similar - bodies, as well as minds, bear witness to the puzzlements, accidents, unfinished business of our lives.”

“The more you watch people change in front of your eyes, the more sure you are about how people can get stuck in childish incidents, or birth incidents, or for all I know pre-birth incidents. You see it right in front of your eyes. And then change happen through Rolfing, and it begins to be possible for a body to take on what we consider appropriate adult form. Then the person continues on psychologically, and develops.”

During 5 weeks, I received a treatment at the Rolfing Institute. I got a deep tissue massage to restore the body's natural posture and structural integration, which certainly, in time, would have a different, very profound, pleasant and fascinating effect on me physically and mentally. The treatment took place just weeks before moving back to Sweden from LA. Immediately when I came to Sweden effects of Rolfing started to show. January 1980, I experienced for the first time how a potential Gand Mal seizure developed into a birth primal. Thanks to my time in the Primal Institute, having understood the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse I could grasp and handle what was happening to me. Not to forget the Primal Retreats in the 80ies.

The rest is happy history. With the single exception that Dr. Janov, who is well acquainted with the potential of Rolfing, is not for it. He wrote in an email to me on the 10/12 of 2010, when I told him that I started the second series of Rolfing treatments: "Rolfing May help but I am not for it because it pushes the muscles to release tension without proper connection to the brain. The brain should first give instructions and then the muscles release as a result of a memory or imprint. It is mindless and I am not for that”.

Dr. Ida Rolf apparently saw it the other way around.

Personally, I speak for both in combination. I am an excellent example myself and I have friends who have shared my experience.

Saxophone and breathing.

My new "act out", to learn to play the saxophone, reminds me of the many emotions that affected my life, consciously or unconsciously. Breathing is a critical factor in the Woodwind Instruments. Being able to keep the tone even and beautiful over several beats would not work with shallow breathing.

Thanks to The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse and Ida Rolf's deep tissue massage / Structural Integration I hope one day being able to handle the saxophone for my own satisfaction. Probably at the price of a number of new repressed feelings popping up!

Jan Johnsson

Arthur JanovFebruary 8, 2016 at 10:38 PM

 Jan, most interesting. art

My Sisyphean Task - To Play The Saxophone.

My Sisyphean task - to play the Saxophone.

During the latter half of the 1950s, I was bitten by the jazz bacillus. My main sources were Studio 52, the jazz club in Lund, Sweden, and a night-time program on Swedish Radio "Jazz Glimpses from New York" with Clas Dahlgren. That the founder of Studio 52, Bjorn Fremer was married to my best friend's beautiful cousin Gun certainly had its importance. She was so beautiful that she belonged to the Eileen Ford organization of fashion models in New York, where Björn, with access to his talent and his wife's financial independence, quickly developed both knowledge and contacts in the jazz circles.

Claes Dahlgren and Bjorn Fremer made many Swedes love, especially, the black American jazz music. My stripes have never gone out. But I miss that I never got the opportunity / could practice music, whether jazz or in any other form. I contented myself with listening and playing my favorites on LPs, which still partly exists after several decades. Lester Young, Ben Webster, Stan Getz and Arne Domnérus were among the saxophonists that were closest to my heart. The icon Charlie "Bird" Parker was too great a virtuous and intellectual that I would be able to assimilate his subtleties.

After I, in adulthood, have sorted out my epilepsy, my ability to articulate my thoughts, my physique, and my nutrition, I thought that I, at 75, needed a new challenge. My subconscious demanded, without outside pressure, that I would acquire musical skills. Since Domnerus, Webster, Getz through their great sounding had dominated my daily life (and often even my dreams) my choice was easy. I wanted to learn to play the saxophone. The decision of the tenor saxophone was certainly colored by my weakness for jazz, but there may also be some form of concession to vanity.

It took me a year to find a saxophone teacher. His name is German Molla and he is a music teacher at the local music school in Genovés besides being an active jazz saxophonist. He is an enthusiastic, friendly and patient person who understand and like my late / mature ambition. His personal qualities will be needed. I come from the absolute position 0, despite my weakness for jazz music. At age 75, I have to learn to read music, be rhythmic, learning the saxophone fingering, create great sounding in woodwind and to be capable of, coordinated, performing all these arts with other musicians.

Intellectually / theoretically talking about the different parts of saxophone music is a piece of cake. Then, for the most part, the left half of the brain works because it is about words. In my particular situation, practice the skills of the various operations and synchronize these is a Sisyphean task. Since The Primal Principle / Evolution In Reverse has eliminated most of my automatic repression mechanism, I must put up with deep feelings of powerlessness and humiliation when I fail to play a simple chord with the correct fingering, right notes, and timing. One day, maybe nano research develop nanoparticles loaded with notes and fingerings and shoot spot on the brain's language / music center. Until then, I have to roll my boulder up the hill like Sisyphus.

To master and assimilate the music's elusive harmonies are not my entire truth. I must also experience how old repressions are evident and, like herpes complicate my journey towards music's magical pinnacles. During the first few weeks, I was stiff and inflexible throughout the body and the breath was suffering and anxiety rose. It felt like the whole house shook and the neighbors became irritated and planned to stop my training sessions.

The emotions behind this anxiety rose rapidly to the surface. They are 60-70 years back in time. When I was a boy, my father would often sleep because offset working hours. Then it was said: "Quiet, your father must sleep!" A further trauma has made itself felt. A painful feeling that I cheated if I prepared myself and read my homework. I had misread my parents' pressure to be the best. I interpreted it as if I should know everything without having the opportunity / need to learn. A torment I lived with for decades. It made me certainly smart but cost unnecessary suffering in many contexts.

My experiences with real difficulties in combination with my re-lived repressions which relatively quickly rises to the surface and dissolves my inhibitions are extremely interesting. My question is how many there are who never get the pleasure to get through natural difficulties due to repressed blockages. It's a fairly logical consequence, but I see this problem suddenly from a new perspective.

Much of cognitive psychotherapy is sentenced to the same punishment as Sisyphus. Rolling the boulder up and having to see it fall down again. Over and over again. A treadmill. When will they ever learn?

Jan Johnsson

Gilbert Bates Jan This article is a classic. The best thing I have read in ages.

A Truth More Painful Than The Organism Can Integrate!

A truth more painful than the organism can integrate!

Everything suggests that the evolutionary approach with repressed pain is for  the survival of the species. Both in the short and longer term. Eternity takes care of itself. Sometimes repressed pain become the mainspring for innovation of both technical and organic nature. The Primal Principle made its random entrance when the destruction artist Raphael Ortiz, during a seance, provoked the gates of repressed pain in a young man to open. When followed up by a gifted seeker of the truth Arthur Janov, with own repressed pain, this led to the discovery of the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse.

When the discoverer of the primal principle, during the last decades has re-lived his own repressed pain and could see his act-outs disappear, then it is a deserved arrogance he displays and annoys his critics with. It is fascinating that a non contemptible measure of earlier act outs has given us the Primal Principle, the opportunity to re-live repressed pain and to live on without the act outs. A logical conclusion (if logic is included in the context), in a neurotic society, is that act outs when they occur selectively, may lead to a less neurotic society. A confirmation of this conclusion is Alice Miller's life. Her lifelong struggle, propelled by unbearable pain, got the whole world to understand the implications of the Black Education and its social connection with home / school / church. This has slowly (too slowly) led to a recognition by the legislation, in more enlightened countries against corporal punishment and physical and mental child abuse.

How hard her life was, I have not been able to understand until now. During the past week, I read the book of of her son (Martin Miller) “Das wahre Drama des begabten Kindes" with the subtitle: Die Tragödie Alice Millers.” Martin Miller describes in a revealing manner his own, confusing loveless childhood as the son of a deeply repressed Alice Miller. Her relationship / marriage, since the Warshaw time, with Martin's fascist father, distorts the picture of human interaction further. Martin tells the story of Alice's life in Poland as a young talented Jewess with a well-off family. Before the war, Alice got the opportunity to study a couple of years in Berlin and to learn German. This had importance for her circumstances, as Polish-speaking to survive WW2 under a false name, and Polish passports among Nazis and informers in Warshaw. She lived with Martin's father during the war under the constant threat of being betrayed and deported to a extermination camp.

After reading Martin Miller's book, I am happy to be able to understand the significance of the horror Alice Miller has had to live through in order to survive and later become powerful / motivated to perform her unique life's work. This understanding I attribute Arthur Janov who so comprehensibly explained that the truth needs defense when it is more than the organism can integrate.

Jan Johnsson

PS

Martin Miller's book is not in English but available only in German. An English interview with Martin Miller can be found here below.

http://www.contemporarypsychotherapy.org/volume-7-no-1-summer-2015/interview-martin-miller/

Ann Lynette Mayo Jan Åke Johnsson This is so Brilliant !! l envy your writing ability !

WHAT'S A WASTE?

• 
  
• What a Waste   (click to access Janov's Reflections)
• What’s a Waste?
  
  
  Over the past few weeks, my childhood friend and I read aloud to each other from Alice Miller, Hermann Hesse and Georg Klein: We have analyzed and filtered our experiences through our interpretations of Arthur Janov, Ida Rolf and not least our own lifelong experiences of pain / success and sweet lies / clairvoyance. The decisive driving force in the choice of our activities has been: more than 60 years of mutual sympathy for each other (though sadly repressed for >50 years), my epilepsy and my / our understanding of Arthur Janovs "Primal Principle" that is, evolution’s systematic encapsulation / repression of all premature and unbearable pain, both physical and mental.
  
  
  This morning when we woke up there was Art's Reflection "What a Waste" in our mailbox. After reading it a few times, so we agreed with Art about: "What a Waste"! However, it was not many minutes before I was filled with swirling thoughts / feelings of >70 years, which admittedly sympathized with Art, but which did not agree with him.
  
  
  Dr. Janovs definition of "waste" felt too one-dimensional, transparent, and without wanting to see the world, evolution as it is. The evolutionary benefits / implications of Arts painful, loveless upbringing led, eventually, to The Primal Principal. This in turn has meant that I, and countless others, have been helped to break us out of our prisons of pain and demystify our symptoms, be safe and sound and to see our individual destinies with better lucidity. I have been able to better understand how evolution prioritize the human species' survival and to accept my mortality and mitigation as an individual.
  
  
  Without experiential insight in The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse, I had not as well been able to integrate Alice Miller’s exploration of the Black, poisionous, Pedagogy. Without their collective wisdom and enlightenment I had thus not been able to understand / believe (as many still do not do!) that  a criminal monster could emerge from an innocent little baby. Nor had I been able to understand how Imre Kertész, who (according to Georg Klein) also had a horrific childhood, developed a capability because of distorted emotions and repressions, as a teenager to endure death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and eventually give us a ruthless unemotional picture of the holocaust in his Nobel prize-winning book “Fateless". 
  
  
  The flashback which Dr. Janov partly feels like a personal "waste" has for me and many others led to insights that have become comprehensible through our own painful experiences. When I am capable, I feel them, they become multi-dimensional insights and conscious awareness. At first thought might episodes / periods be perceived as "waste". Overall, and viewed from a holistic perspective, they feel like an improvment / creation.
  
  
  I end with a few verses from Inger Christensen's Requiem "The Butterfly Valley", which I highly recommend as one of the most beautiful creations of the fluctuations in the evolution / life.
  
  
  Concealed by the perfume of mountains brush,
  all blossoming is rooted in decay,
  in tangle, shadow, and decomposition,
  a labyrintine, wild insanity,
  
  
  just as the butterfly in flight conceals
  the insect body to which it is bound -
  we see it as a flower flying up
  not as the rank iconoclasm it is -
  
  
  Jan Johnsson

  
  

  Arthur JanovJanuary 12, 2016 at 5:33 AM

  Insights never erase the hurt. They only make sense of it. art

DEMIAN Of Hermann Hesse Alias Emil Sinclair.

DEMIAN of Hermann Hesse alias Emil Sinclair.

While Dr. Janov has lately reflected on his “war life” and on the psychological motives of the terrorists who on a daily basis harasses the Middle East and who recently paralyzed an unprepared but certainly not surprised Paris, I have, as a complement to his Reflections read Demian, written by the Nobel Prize winner, in 1946, Hermann Hesse. (He wrote the book, under the pseudonym, Emil Sinclair,  incidentally after WW1, when he had been in psychotherapy with his friend Carl Jung.) The novel invites the interpretation of my life in two, at least, development stages. The first stage extends from early childhood up until My Sturm und Drang / youth turmoil ended with that I, at 20, developed epilepsy. The second stage began when I read The Primal Scream, 1974, and was sucked into the Janov revolt against the, still, prevailing psychotherapeutic cognitive paradigm. Finally, I will enclose a passage from the novel Demian, which supports Janov’s analysis of the violence which stems from our, and especially from terrorists’, repressed pain.

Demian - Stage No. 1:

Like Sinclair, I came from a religious home with a surrounding world that was different. In this way, I got early the taste for being "bilingual" / split. I learned to live in a religious family while managing my "secret" secular values and ideals. To fall asleep with mothers prayers grinding in the ears and on the morning after willingly adapt to my friends' values and spice my language with blasphemous or obscene language. Because my relationship with my father was emotionally lousy and limited to his practical approach to diligence and work ethic, so I got myself in my early teens talented and respected substitutes / role models. Among them was my first “Demian”. He was named Torsten Tegner a legendary journalist and newspaper owner. He answered my letters and sent me his dedicated memoir books. His light still shines.

The prize, which I paid as a rebel, was loneliness and suffering. A pain that I acted out by constantly talking, analyzing, fantasizing and daydreaming about how my emotions were satisfied. During sleep, I had overwhelming nightmares in which I fell and lost balance. My life until the 20s was an emotional turmoil at a high cost. (“It was no way to be!” as Art Janov says.) Although I do not wish someone the same painful experience I would not want to be without it. As Sinclair puts it: "A bird fighting its way out of the egg, and the egg was the world, and the world had to fall into pieces." "I looked for Abraxas the uniting of godly and devilish elements”.

Demian - Stage No. 2:

After I read The Primal Scream, Arthur Janov became my Demian and inner guide. He opened up a new world. He furthermore stated that it largely existed within me. (“The memory remains in order to be experienced and liberated. We have the mechanism/organism for our own liberation inside us”.) I was convinced that, if I could release it, I could get free from my epilepsy. From that time, I had a double agenda and in everything I did, there was an LA-stay included / programmed.

Nothing revolutionizing happened during my 2 years in Primal Therapy. At least not on the surface. On the contrary, I was disappointed with the atmosphere that surrounded The Primal Institute. There was an aura among therapists and patients, which reminded me of the religious nonconformism that I grew up with and which I soon become allergic to. However, since I had paid big money I kept in touch but went on the backburner. My idealized picture of Arthur Janov was never disturbed because I, during these years, only saw him a few times at group meetings. Despite my limited attendance at the Primal Institute, the ideas of re-living repressed pain, which Art Janov sown in my mind,  grew ever stronger.

During my LA-years it was Vivian Janov who acted “Demians mother”. She had impressed me already by my strange impromptu interview (during a honeymoon trip to California in 1977) and would, moreover, later also help me with contacts in Boulder, Col., which would have important implications for how my therapy developed. The name, in Boulder, I was given by Vivan led to that I got my first contact with Ida Rolf and her Structural Integration. This experience would dramatically alter my therapeutic worldview in which The Primal Principle plays the same psychological role as gravity does in physics. Art Janov proceeded as my distant guide and he has, then and later, never forbidden that I skipped shafts, although he may have grumbled. Curiously, he never showed interest in my holistic experiments / successes. Probably he had too much unrelived pain to free himself from, thus he continued his life long quest, especially in patients, thereby maybe mirroring a kind of “authority” he inherited, while growing up, from insensitive parents. That reminds me of striking similarities to Alice Millers attitude.

The fact that Art Janov as the inventor of The Primal Principle was a true non-conformist in the psychotherapeutic world, did of course my own position being an outlier, not only to the cognitiv paradigm but also to The Primal Inventor, at times uncertain. Time, however, has so far given me the right, at least about my own fate. My holistic therapy options do not change the fact that with Art Janov, as my “Demian”, it's been an amazing journey. This journey has been more important than my destination.  

Passage from the novel Demian:

“It was nearly winter by the time I was sent to the front.

In the beginning, despite the sensations aroused by the constant gunfire, I was disappointed in everything. Earlier I had thought a lot about why it was so extremely unusual for a person to be able to live for an ideal. Now I saw that many people, all in fact, are capabel of dying for an ideal. Only, it mustn’t be a personal, freely chosen ideal, but one held in common and taken over from other people.

But as time went by, I saw that I had underestimated people. Even though military service and their shared danger made them so much alike, nethertheless I saw many, the living and the dying, approach the acceptance of destiny in a splendid manner. Not only while attacking, but all the time, many of them, very many, had that steady, distant, almost obsessed gaze that is not directed at goals but indicates complete surrender to the prodigious. No matter what they chose to believe and think - they were ready, they were useful, the future could be formed from them. And no matter how inflexebly the world was clamoring for war and heroism, honor and other outmoded ideals, no matter how remote and unlikely every voice that apparently spoke up for humanity sounded, all of that was merely superficial, just as the question of the external and political aims of the war remained superficial. 

Deep down, something was evolving. Something like a new humanity. Because I could see many people, and a number of them died alongside me, who had gained the emotional insight that hatred and rage, killing and destroying, were not linked to the specific objects of that rage. No, the objects, just like the aims, were completely accidental. Those primal feelings, even the wildest of them, weren’t directed against the enemy; their bloody results were merely an outward materialization of peoples inner life, the split within their souls, which desired rage and kill, destroy and die, so that they could be reborn. A gigantic bird was fighting its way out of the egg, and the egg was the world, and the world had to fall to pieces.”

Jan Johnsson

To Be Able To Cure Or Not To Be Able To Cure, That Is A Primal Question.

Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition Epigenetics and Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis (Part 3/20) (Click to access) October 28, I wrote to Art Janov: I wonder if you still have the film French television made 25-30 years ago, and if I might buy a copy of that recording?  The film shows how, especially on my forehead, lots of blue-black bruises reappeard. In tens of bloggs I have described how I relived my birthtrauma and the subsequent and fabolous aftereffects, which not only demystified my epilepsy but cured me and profoundly changed my feelings and my behaviour as my neuroses and blockages dissolved (no longer were needed). (Tens of thousands have read my blogs and especially the russians are intreseted in them.) To describe my journey in a short video may be intresting but it will never give a true and complete picture. I ow myself, you and The Primal Principle a re-writing of my book "Evolution in Reverse / How I demystified my Epilepsy". October 28, Art Janov wrote: I think it is great.  Are you writing the book now?  Did you indeed cure the epilepsy? art October 28, I answered: Art, If any of your patiens ever got long-term cured, I was one of them! Since cured has important components of time, evolution (in reverse!) and duration I will add the following to make clear what I mean when I say that I am cured: During 35 years, since January 1980, I have had primals. If these primals, gradually, little by little, reliving a complex longlasting and horrific trauma in the birth channel had not happened (over 30 years) they had turned into grand mal and petit mal seizures. (During the 80ies you participated in at least 2 of my dramatic primals, one of which, with bruises reappearing all over my forhead, were filmed by French television). After having decided to drop my career  in the mid 90ies I quit all medications (Tegretol/Carbamazepine). I spent 2 satanical but revolutionary years when I “entered” my epilepsy and found myself in the borderland between grandmal seizures and primals. That meant eventually less seizures and more primals. Finally primals became a habit and my few seizures had now the character of petit mal seizures. I could not only “lay back and feel the stab of anxiety” and go into a primal when I was awake, but I could also have dramatic dreams when I could decide to go into a primal. During such a primal I became awake, or rather there was, during the primal, no difference between dream and wakefulness. Over the last 4-5 years I have only in few occasions had to go into a primal. That has happened, for example, when a special, surpricing and dramatic event has brought up a repressed memory. If my tensions and anxiety were channeled into primals there were no need for epileptic seizures. During the last 20 years my lifepattern has changed and my earlier neurotic drive faded away as I relived my imprint/pain and I stopped working myself into impossible situations. I could suddenly feel that I had limits and needed to rest and relax and allow myself to be lazy. It seems that my epilepsy was an evolutionary quick way to save my brain and life. My former employers considered me to be without inhibitions. I went on fighting until I fell (read: got epilepsy). Yes Art, I am cured from epilepsy. It has meant reliving pain which has lead to a modified lifepattern; less struggling, more feelings. I have less urge to do the impossible. My main motivations to put it all together over 35 years are easily identifiable: To cure myself, The Primal Principle, your charisma and your unhesitating conviction, my daughter Isabel and my childhood love Eva. Compared to many patients I have been blessed by an identifiable problem. I come from an economically and socially priotitized part of the world. I have been able to function and develop an exciting career. Although my judgement has been neurotically driven, I’ve been able to make good and important decisions. I have had the crucial support of resource-rich, knowledeable and sympathetic people (including yourself). Last but not least, I had two parents who finally realized and admitted their wrongdoing. Even though I have cured my variant of epilepsy, it is a seemingly hopeless task to transfer my experience to other epileptics. Your confident Jan October 28, Art Janov wrote: HOW WONDERFUL.  CAN I PUBLISH?   IT IS SO AMAZING THAT OTHERS NEED TO LEARN FROM THIS   LOVE ART Janov's Reflections on the Human Condition: Primal Therapy and Epilepsy: a Letter From a Former Patient