Chromatic Scale vs. Electroshock Therapy.

Chromatic Scale vs. Electroshock Therapy.

Due to my 48-hour birthing process, back in 1940, I have re-lived / experienced how I was subjected to physical pressure, choking, strangulation and anesthetics during hours and how I finally was turned around and pulled out with the tail first as a breech. These experiences I have re-lived, on and off, for 20 years until the source of repressed pain apparently was close to empty. My last two decades have been pretty normal and I have experienced how emotions and intellect have been able to interact/cooperate freely without medication. Occasionally, some unexpected experience has provoked a stab of anxiety and blues which I have been able to solve by laying back and feeling the reason. A process that eventually has become rare.

An important part of my life pattern has been to develop addictive challenges/struggles. These imprints/tendencies are still there, deep down, but I have reached a point where I am now aware of the addictive process and can, with some efforts, cancel a neurotic process that does not correspond to real needs. Since I have filled my life with a lot of challenges and struggling of sometimes doubtful character I have of course also missed out to fulfill real needs. One of the needs I have missed for a lifetime has been to be able to sing and play an instrument. A lot of my time has been spent, in adulthood, struggling with the Danish, English, German, and Spanish languages.

I have for decades enjoyed listening to the best jazz saxophone players. I have internalized this sound to a degree that I often have dreams with saxophone music in the background. I decided in 2015 that I would learn to play the saxophone. Easy to say, easy to acquire (the tenor sax). At 75, I had, suddenly, given myself a Sisyphus task, to roll a stone / a tenor saxophone up the hill, over and over again, without any basic knowledge of music, fingering, rhythm, sound, etc. To learn English at 30 and Spanish at 50 was a breeze. It suits, however, my historical neurotic life pattern, and new parts of my brain are getting activated, its neurons forming new clusters. To feel like a child who starts from the beginning can be a nice compensation for fear and anxiety to fail.

I have written about my dream about the chromatic jazz scale (A Different Way Of Using A Chromatic Scale). It was not a one-off. My primal, often begin when I enter rem sleep. During the last two months, on two occasions I have re-lived how my head during a primal suddenly is hit by electric impulses, an utmost painful feeling with certain similarities to my first petit mal fits in my late teens. My primals nowadays are far less painful than before, so the first re-living of electroshock treatment was just that, a shock and surprise, when I finally after 3/4 of a century had the strength to experience it. 

“Electroconvulsive therapy (ETC) was introduced in Switzerland 1937 och was already 1940 widespread and Nobel Prize-nominated. Electroshock is a psychiatric treatment that involves electrocution of the patient and putting the patient into a seizure. Mainstream psychiatry argues that electroshock is therapeutic and alleviates mental illness. Many electroshock patients receive the treatment against their will. Psychiatrists also claim that electroshock is safe during pregnancy and give treatment to pregnant women. A study in 2007 (!) found that electroshock during pregnancy can cause brain damage to the fetus!” Surprise!

Thanks to my new addiction (learning to play the saxophone) I have found out that I / my brain is strong enough to re-live the effects of a treatment which, fortunately, never got the Nobel Prize. With less luck and with a more old-fashioned neurologist than David Ingvar, I could have been treated with an even worse method, lobotomy, which, outrageously, won the Nobel Prize, 1949, when 20.000 lobotomies had been performed in the US alone. This treatment was applied to a daughter of friends of our family. She died within 2 years.

Jan Johnsson

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cZF2dOZPM

How Pain Can Be Translated / Intellectualized Into Beuty / Feelings / Emotions.

Why Don't We Know We Are in Pain? That is today's question in Janov's Reflections. Yes, it is certainly interesting that the lack of awareness / consciousness is a fact. It demonstrates the rational intelligence in the process of evolution, which maneuvers the majority of us through life, with success, though, at the price of suffering. Most of the works in our daily life, like arts, politics, business, etc., are screaming out their statements about the pain that are inprinted in us, all the time without a break.

Bach, Picasso, and Janov are outstanding people who are among those who are / were in pain, suffering something they didn’t know much about. However, they used their pain to “intellectualize their feelings” and in art, music and literature express the dilemma of the human tragedy. They do it with a beauty and sensibility which gives our lives a meaningful experience. It takes different beliefs, not only religious, to survive in a cold, negligent and often loveless world. The aforementioned, pain propelled, beautiful spirits are special through their ability to capture, to counterpoint / interlace the beauty and tragedy of our short lives. Their neuroses give us satisfying experiences, while evolution grinds on. 

Johann Sebastian Bach came from a musical family, was orphaned early, but got through his sibling's help, first-class musical education. Throughout his life, he used, in the fight against tradition / zeitgeist and religious control his ingenious musical talents to express his own inner beliefs despite the fact that the church and the established powers were his superiors. He developed his creativity, musical talent and knowledge of music to the point where it grew out of the protestant church's religious possession and became everybody’s emotional musical heritage of today. Although - thanks to - being discouraged and criticized, he used the church / contemporary official worldview to show the tragedy of all our pain propelled / bloated complacency.

Pablo Ruiz Picasso was born into an established family of artists and devoted almost 90 years to drawing and painting and fascinated his surroundings with a never-ending ability to express his naïve capacity. A severe trauma, a violent earthquake, combined with the sister's complicated birth in Malaga when he was 2-3 years old characterized left imprints, in the work of art, which his artistic talent expressed. Picasso's success became prolonged due to the constant renewal of his pain propelled symbolism and thanks to the exponential / absurd growing economic valuation of art in the last century. Picasso, who was registered communists into his death, is probably the artist, all categories whose works brought in the most money. Again, a reflection of the beauty and tragedy of the neurotic human trauma.

Arthur Janov was an unloved son of immigrated Russian peasants. He was an “asphalt-flower” from a metropolitan ghetto, who with the Navy’s / WW2’s help became prepared for a work / life, in various mental institutions with people with repressed pain. We needed him to understand / access information about the difference between a good or bad life before, during or after birth. It has required an extraordinary amount of repressed pain / empathic intellect to create an economic wealth / independence that was invested in the explanation of the lifesaving ability of evolution to repress what threatened our lives. He took us on a tour beyond our and his own belief.

No pain, no gain!

Jan Johnsson

Feeling Pain; Growing Fingers and Dissolving a Neurotic Life Pattern

Feeling Pain; 

Growing Fingers and Dissolving a Neurotic Life Pattern.

The principles of Primal Therapy / Evolution in Reverse, as I have interpreted them, have worked excellent for my specific needs. They have helped demystify my epilepsy / birth trauma, dissolved my neurotic life pattern and helped me understand / internalize why evolution saves our lives by eliminating / repressing unbearable pain. My cure, overall, has been a holistic process where body and mind, sometimes simultaneously and sometimes separately, have been involved. My three union brain has become significantly better coordinated and my feelings have been given a more natural influence on my intellect and vice versa. 

My physical coordination has to a surprisingly high extent improved. I have experienced how allergies have dissolved and how fingers and toes, after the 40s, have grown out to their original potential (before being inhibited in a traumatic birth trauma). I had and, at a lesser degree, still have, since many years, a feeling, below my fit body, of not being fully physically grown. A feeling of being weaker and minor than I really am. Examples: I have had too insensitive fingers when I would hug and caress someone. “My emotional feeling did not reach all the way to my fingertips”, which I unconsciously compensated for by putting more pressure. 

For decades, I looked for and dressed in clothes that were just on the verge of being too small. Just right size or slightly too large clothes brought my feeling / pain of not being fully grown. My neurotic disability made me a perfect employee in the corset industry, which those days , before modern day slimming madness took off, was about lacing too large bodies in tight-fitting underwear. In this industry, I spent, successfully, my first 10 years before my career took off. I am nowadays enjoying baggy trousers and large shirts…

I found no direct coverage for my undeveloped physics and my feelings of being too small in the Primal Scream and I did not become wiser in these matters during my first few months at the Primal Institute. Coincidences /moonlighting in the biotech industry, brought me, however, to Boulder, Col., and I attended Ida Rolf's institute with deep tissue massage even though I knew that PI was not for it. 

“Physical individuality is shaped by the forces of life - how we were born, when we learned to move, experiences, accidents, mental and emotional sets. All of these leave a record in our mental and our physical memories.The more you watch people in front of your eyes, the surer 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. Through Rolfing, 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.”

These, by me often quoted, statements, together with the Primal Principles / Evolution in Reverse, have been my lead stars when I made my journey from being a physically hampered, repressed person with leaky gates / epilepsy, who had developed a neurotic tool bag with a large arsenal of short-term survival techniques into a reasonably well-cured person with good vital signs.

For me, the combination of primal therapy and Ida Rolf's method of deep tissue massage was a big step on the road to understanding my repression / epilepsy and my equally inhibited and uncoordinated body. Janov and Rolf approached the problem from two opposite directions. In both their written communications, it appears, unfortunately, that they do not accept each other's methods. To cooperate was, therefore, probably never an option. Fortunately, neither of these therapies prevented me from combining the two and achieve a result which, for me, was better than the sum of both.

Of course, they could do it together. Why have they not done what have seemed obvious for decades?

Well, after having read “Beyond Belief”, I think I am beginning to understand!

Jan Johnsson

Why Primal Therapy?

Why Primal Therapy?

I read the Primal Scream 1974 in Danish (Primal Skriget) and it became instantly, with it’s “promise” to resolve repressed feelings, a core component of my obsession to tackle the causes of my epilepsy. Epilepsy I had developed 15 years earlier after a childhood / infancy marked by ADD and daydreams. Although I was a charming and well-liked child I was tortured badly from a thin and ugly hair, unlike my parents and three siblings who had strong and curly hair. My parents did not hide their delight at their beautiful hair which I interpreted as criticism of my own hair growth. To make things worse, with epileptic medication, my head became quickly bald and over the years, I developed a neurotic attraction to curly partners.

When I lived in LA in 1978 and 79, I brought a beautiful and curly blonde wife. My bald apparition, with repressed pain, I hid behind her radiant beautiful hair. I thought, then, that the wounds of my many years of suffering due to the bald head had cleared. With Yul Brynner’s, Kojaks and beautiful curly wives' help. How wrong! Below my defenses lurked the pain.

I have previously complained about the fact that my two years in LA with PT gave a meager yield. However, I had a Primal during a session with my therapist Patty after we had discussed my childhood. I felt sad and abandoned and my feelings moved to just after WW2. Suddenly I was pushed off my father's lap and my, 3 years younger, sister took my place and I saw her with her blonde curly hair hugging my father. My sister's hair was during my primal experience, 1946/47, blonde, while it in 1978 was very dark. Her blond childhood I had forgotten. This explained why I had always been obsessed by preferably blonde curls.

In a historic cavalcade my curly girlfriends slid past and my feeling, which I was overwhelmed by, explained to me that my curly acquaintances over the years had been my way to hide my hurt feelings and show my father and my sister that I could attract curly women. My curly hallucinatory parade of acquaintances ended suddenly with an enlarged photo of Art Janov from the Danish Primal Scream. My attraction of primal therapy meant not solely a therapeutical way to tackle my epilepsy, but also meant a neurotic attraction of Arts beautiful curly hair that reinforced my ambition to go to LA.

Two years after my primal about how my blonde sister dethroned me, I went to a retreat in Bern with a blond curly woman, a jazz singer from Copenhagen. We laughed and joked about my weakness for blonde women and after a successful retreat, where Art Janov and the woman was singing jazz together ("Must you be mean to me ...") so had my neuroses taken me from a life with one curly blonde woman to another. It cost me several more relationships before I come so far in my re-living traumatic birth experiences that, in old age, I approached the woman / childhood friend, with black straight hair, I realized early on should have been my friend in life if not my epilepsy / my neuroses led me astray.

When I was 6 years old in the first grade of elementary school, I had an old angry teacher. She quickly eliminated my desire for music and song, and she advised my mother that I sang as a "bass drum in the desert." I and many others have often laughed a lot at that statement, but on the inside I have, for 70 years, been crying. In my dreams, I often sang to myself like Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole and many of my hallucinatory / primal experiences, for a number of years, Hungarian gypsy music was an important component.

The fact that I've started playing tenor saxophone recently is something of a highlight of my life due to that a curly shrink with “transposition problems”, has guided me to re-live pain. Just like my shrink, I can now concentrate for long periods, I have all the time I need and therefore I look forward, one day, to be able to play along a Charlie Parker record. Being able to transpose or not.

Jan Johnsson 

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

Eight Years Of “Pollyanna Therapy” Which Changed The World!

Janov Reflections: The Pollyanna Effect of Looking for the Positive (Click to access)

My comment:

Eight years of “Pollyanna therapy” which changed the world!

Sometimes we only respond to effects which reflect ourselves and our underlying needs and feelings. We often only have a preoccupation with recognizing what is wrong. It is in our nature to do it. We are so focused on a particular tree species that we do not appreciate the beauty of a forest.

When I lived in the US in 1978 and 79, the country went through a severe crisis, financially and emotionally, in the aftermath of the Vietnam War. The economy went bad, the dollar was knocked down (which, however, was to my advantage), the general confidence was low and an unusually human and sympathetic president, Jimmy Carter, was unable to lift the mood significantly. 

Then you could talk about a need for a Pollyanna Effect in the United States. Hollywood delivered in this state an option. From California came a governor, former b-actor, and president of the Screen Actors Guild, the labor union for actors. A seasoned veteran who should actually have been retired. We were many who were terrified when this anti-communist, former democrat, with his views on weapon, morning prayers, and economic laissez-faire attitude took over power. 

However, during his eight years in power, he succeeded with his Pollyanna Effect, largely reversing the confidence and the economy in the United States. "In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problems; government is the problem.” With charm, straight language (calling the Soviet Union an evil empire), economic sanctions, he participated in the highest degree to tear down the Berlin Wall and dissolve the Soviet Union. Without a single shot was exchanged !!!!! Talented Russians, including politicians, have afterwards confessed, not without praise and thanks, the effects Reagans Pollyanna-propelled sanctions achieved.

In a neurotic world, there is so much to criticize and improve, but there are, after all, also occasions to celebrate someone (such as a Picasso) when this person with his pain propelled images lift us into a different world or out of a depressed state. My own obsession / positive dream that one day to find an explanation for my epilepsy mystery became in this way, with a kind of  Pollyanna Effect, reality.

Jan Johnsson

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