THE EVOLUTIONARY APHORISM EXPRESSING THE GENERAL "TRUTH"

Debaters in Art Janov’s blog all know why everyone feels unwell, why cognitive therapy flops, why neurotic politicians are hampering the development they believe in, etc. Scientists doing research in old age problems do know that those who reach optimal age are not becoming bitter, because they do not regret their decisions during life, while those who go through life bitter and regret-filled they die earlier, in both cases without that scientists are concerned about why, and without finding out where the mother cyst is! In other words, it looks in psycho therapy and research on aging just like everywhere else in life. I will give some general examples what I mean.

If a soccer club, such as FC Barcelona, has 170 000 members, there are 170 000 views on how the club should be run, which players will be bought, what power and authority coaches and leaders should have, and what role the club has to play in different social contexts, it's just the club's board and president who do not understand... In the city of Stockholm, where a little exaggerated, there are 860 000 views on how traffic and transportation should be organized and financed, it's only urban management and the operational managers that do not understand...

We all need to understand quickly, to be right and to feel part. To do this based on objective facts rarely happens. A frequent type of consumers regularly visits their local supermarket and buy a pack of 6 big Coca Cola, a 6-pack of Fanta and a 6-pack of huge cans of beer without being able feeling concerned about him / herself and those family members carrying 20-40 pounds overweight and too high vital signs ... The same citizens are carrying, May 1st, placards in protest against the politicians' ill-conceived decisions regarding their children's education, school meals and lack of jobs.

When Greece, the cradle of our culture and democracy, after decades of mismanagement, corruption and violated (EU) democratic procedures, then occurred, following the laws of nature (spending dramatically greater than revenue = inability to correct mouth according to cloth), that the country goes into bankruptcy and must be forcibly administered. Moral neurotics, world wide, rise afterwards, with a warm heart, their voices, and suspect international conspiracies.

I have over 40 years seen how patients, therapists, researchers and educators have suppressed Art Janov's principle of "Evolution In Reverse," which is the cornerstone of the Primal Therapy. Why? Probably, to a large extent because Art's idea cannot be exploited at a profit neither for the general psychologist / medical profession nor for the pharmaceutical industry. This gives, in turn, not the financial means for government leaders / decision makers, which fact formally determines what official research / training will be focused on.

I managed myself, despite my neurotic life pattern to prove the validity of Art’s innovation/paradigm-change, because I was “lucky” to have an imprint/stigma that, nothing apart from lobotomy was supposed to “cure”. My last remaining chance was to go into my epilepsy and feel the stab of my pain to be free and to survive.

Unfortunately, many sufferers were/are not forced enough to feel their pain. In the short term (without "knowing" that death is a neurotic time factor) more than 99% choose to live with numb pain, whether the anesthetic is created by drugs, medicines or neuroses. The result is a part of our lifestyle / lifelie. To 100%. It is part of evolution. 

The only way out is “Evolution In Reverse”. However, you need, both, to get over your numbing fear and let go of your intellectual life buoy.

Jan Johnsson

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gALRkzB530A&feature=related

(Edit Piaf who sings about how she doesn’t regret, died of liver cancer at age 47....)

Drowning The Fish

My brain is fantastic. It has taken me on an extensive roundtrip through certain parts of the evolution, which has allowed me to demystify my epilepsy. To confirm the essens of my experiences during the last 40 years I want to give an example of the advice, of the inventor of “Evolution In Reverse”, “to lay back and allow the stab of anxiety to overtake us”.

It is Saturday and my daughter is spending the weekend at home, and we have had a friendly, straight and positive communication about almost everything from money, sex education at school, politics, human shortcomings, how to dress, how to learn from your mistakes etc. to where we would bury our dog, Puskas, if he dies. These discussions took place while both of us did whatever we had to do. Isabel carried out weekly cleaning routines while for vanity’s sake, she had put a mudpack to enhance her skin’s already high quality. I was on the internet, stretched, went off and bought strawberries and cooked dinner. Life felt good, and we were pretty much on the same wavelength.

Late in the afternoon, after dinner I took a nap. After an hour or so I woke up with a slight tension over my mouth and eyes, and with the house in full piece, I decided to allow the stab of tension to overtake me. It developed into a wordless process over two hours. Slowly, the pressure intensified over my face and developed into my mouth, my throat and I felt it intensely right down to my fingers and toes as electrical impulses. Since I have been through this process during more than 40 years, there was nothing scary in this wordless re-experience of my birth. It was once again a confirmation that the wordless terror and agony, that I now after 72 years have the strength to go through, is equal to the reality, I as a fetus not endured, but via cramps and stenosis shut down in order to survive. My birth-process lasted in all 48 hours and the most dramatic of those ended in an imprint that led to my developing epilepsy. My epileptic attacks were compressed versions of the unbearable part of my birth trauma.

However, something sensational happened today. After falling deeper than usual into the anesthesia, that often surrounds me during my primals, I was suddenly violently compressed and hyper ventilated sharply, followed by no breathing at all. For a long while, I struggled frantically to get some air without success. Suddenly, I gave up and I felt like a drowned fish. I could not get enough oxygen, however, I could feel the devastating consequences instead of having an epileptic cramp. Then it took a while and the intensive feeling of being compressed released.  All of a sudden I smiled happily when I made a connection in my brain and from seemingly nowhere remembered Art’s Reflection this morning about how he spoke of: “I’m still drowning the fish...”

I was afraid that after two hours of intense wordless memories/feelings that my intellectual brain had stopped working, but now as I write, it feels as easy as a piece of cake to express myself.

Jan Johnsson


Can a fish drown?

Fish get their oxygen directly from the water. They have organs called gills that take oxygen out of the water, just as your lungs take oxygen out of the air. But water can run out of oxygen, just as air can.

So fish can suffocate in water, which means they can drown in water.

These drownings occur most often in small ponds that dry up. All the fish that live in the pond are crowded into the remaining water, where they use up all the oxygen in the water, then drown. Fish can also drown if their gills are damaged in a collision with an underwater plant or in a fight with other sea creatures.

Weather conditions also account for some drownings. For example, when some fish realize that oxygen supply in the water is getting very low, they rise to the surface and suck air into a sac-like organ called the air bladder.

The fish can then take oxygen out of this air instead of directly out of the water. But in cold weather, when the surface of the water is frozen, the fish can’t reach that air, and so they drown.

JJ

A Round Trip Under The Evolutionary Umbrella.

Another Look at Electroshock Therapy (Click to access!)

A round trip under the evolutionary umbrella.

At 19, I developed epilepsy and my doctor prescribed anti-epileptic medication. Somewhat pointedly, I can say that I was given a "chemical lobotomy". This was an alternative to the existing radical and grim choice of electroshock, which in turn was the step before the even more radical and most cruel of all existing options, ie surgical lobotomy. (This happened in the 50ies and in 1949 Egas Moniz  had got the Nobelprize for having developed the lobotomy process...)

These were several decades before Art had developed his principles about “Evolution In Reverse” and what I mean to paint the picture, from my youth, of the alternative methods to eliminate epilepsy, is that I am extremely happy today I got sick in just the time when “chemical lobotomy” was made available, and that I had the good luck of having a young and talented doctor (Dr. David Ingvar) who could guide me in a difficult time.

Why do I use the phrase “chemical lobotomy” to describe the medical treatment, I, without a doubt, was in need of? Because it resembles the effects of a neuro-surgical procedure, a form of psycho surgery, believed to eliminate anxiety, pain and seizures. The advantage of the “chemical lobotomy”, according to reported experiences, is that it is not, to the same extent as surgical lobotomy, followed by severe depressions and apathy. It also had the extraordinary privilege when the Primal Therapy had developed into an alternative, that the medicine little by little could be eliminated.

From the time, I received the benefits of modern “chemical lobotomy”, gradually my epileptic journey meant that I was turned off from contacts with that feeling part of my brain where my life-threatening birth process was imprinted. This gave me, of course, contingent benefits. I could survive short-term, career, develop many intellectual abilities, and I had the opportunity to create resources and contacts one day to be capable to “lay down and allow that stab of anxiety to overtake me and make me free”. When this happened, the direction of my journey changed, and I was able, during years, to dissolve the survival tools, like neurotic games, repression and other painkillers, provided by the evolution.

Eventually, I searched and found help because I “knew” / guessed that my epilepsy and anxiety were caused by a pain that precluded my attempts to meet actual real needs. Due to survival reasons, I was instinctively an innovative producer of painkilling neuroses. My life was a trade mill that at no time stopped spinning and never gave any lasting rest and quiet. After 40 changing and stimulating years in and out of the Primal Therapy, I have learned to slowly cope with feeling repressed pain and scale off the countless layers of neurotic behavior and reflexes that my survival demanded. My neurosis have taken on both emotional, intellectual, physical and social expressions, and sometimes they have been favorably received by an impressed surrounding (which in no way made it easier later to remove these neurotic behaviors, at least initially).

After 53 years, I have contacted the woman, Eva, who had a decisive influence on me before I developed epilepsy, ie before I was “chemically lobotomized”. As I have mentioned in a chapter of my book “Evolution in Reverse /Demystifying my Epilepsy,” she then (1959!!!) in a letter, with an attached photo,  tells me that I was the love of her youth. That is, she had cared for me, including my cocky immature way, before I became “chemically lobotomized” and still was in comparative youthful harmony with myself. As a result of 40 years of contact with and guidance by Art Janov, I've regained an ability to react to feelings that has long been buried under medication, neuroses and act outs. During Eva's and my discussions, I feel an instinctive awareness / urge to develop part of my reactions, which were lobotomized at the age of 19.

An important prerequisite for my survival over the years has been tied to that, I, as in Maslow’s Pyramide, has created a large number of short-term subjective well-beings. Through the Primal Therapy and Evolution in Reverse, it feels at last that I have become free from the effects of having been “chemically lobotomized”. At more than 70, I experience my first objective well-being. Without euphoria. With no need to impress. Without feeling anxiety. As Eva and I take and give with the same desire, life feels easy right now.

My epileptic journey has been an exciting adventure, a kind of round trip through a crucial part of evolution. I feel I finally come aboard the right train!

The “travel agency” is located in Los Angeles, and you impart your own feelings!

Jan Johnsson

Following the Evolution. Score of a Composition vs. Full Orchestra.

My comments to

On the Mystery of the Unconscious (click to access!):

“The Mystery of the Unconscious” provides a perfect background sketch of many of the essentials that for more than 40 years have affected me, when I have sought the help of evolution to come to grips with my epilepsy and my often sophisticated, yet painkilling and humiliating neuroses. Thanks to your tuition on the evolutionary 1,2,3 hierarchy in the brain, I have managed to develop new sides of myself. It has been a time-consuming process - much different than the “quick fix” that first attracted me in The Primal Scream and got me hooked.

In approximately the rate at which I could feel and experience my pain below the level of conscious/awareness, at the same pace my neuroses dissolved, and my behavior became more adapted to real needs, as a result I could feel even more of the terror and anxiety that were imprinted, and the less I was drawn to acting guided by my earlier anxiety, etc. etc.. It has been a gradual evolutionary process over more than 40 years, which has resulted in the interesting fact that I have been motivated to develop my intellectual/scholarly brain to understand the context. As a bonus, my rose intellectual capacity, which increased with access to my feelings, helped me feel more authentic, and I find it more difficult to deceive myself and others.

I have often wondered how I could best describe my therapy process. Only now when I read your Reflections I realize that the words; “lay back and allow the stab of anxiety to overtake us”, is the simple summary how I eventually became free from most of my anxiety and pain, which had its origin in a horrific birthing process.

In the introduction, I compared your Reflection, with a sketch. Behind all the great works of art (sic) in history, whether it be Michelangelo or Proust, were an infinite number of sketches, before we could enjoy their masterpieces. Reading today’s article, and understand it, is like taking part of the score of a musical composition. When we have reached the point where we can “lay down and allow that stab of anxiety to overtake us and make us free”, then we experience the composition played and conducted by a full orchestra.

We can make ends meet!

Jan Johnsson

Arthur JanovApr 10, 2012 12:33 PM
Jan: Brilliant as usual. art

MY WAY OF PRIMAL THERAPY

About some laws of nature: On the Difference Between Help and Cure
by Art Janov

MY WAY OF PRIMAL THERAPY

Last night, during a couple of hours, I had a conversation with two Swedish friends. This led to a long dream during the latter part of the night. The dream did not give me, during its initial part, the same freedom and pleasure that my calls via Skype had made me feel, they were sensationally relaxing. My relaxation was apparently greater than I was aware of when I went to bed.

The dreams basic theme was that I had gotten a new job which meant access to a yellow company bicycle. At a very early stage, I was stopped and arrested by the police, and I was told that I was not at liberty until I had paid a compulsory license plus a fine. My irritation and excitement were immediate and increased progressively, and I spoke ironically and freely from the heart to all those police officers and officials who were in excessive numbers at the large police station. I refused to pay and also pointed out that I had no money. The latter was a lie and I either swallowed, during feelings of being choked, my money or put them in my shoes. The currency (euro) was not in harmony with the time of my dream; they should have been Swedish crowns since I was young, maybe 20 years old in the dream. I had vague memories of feelings that were related to the job and the boss I had, when I was between 17 and 21 years of age.

After being circulated among officials in the overcrowded police house, I decided after a while to change my aggressive resistance to the unreasonable demands for payment of a license fee and fine. I calmed down and decided that, under the protection of the vast human throng at the station, sneak out and escape the field. Nobody had seen my identity documents and could not find me again if I came out of my locked position.

To my amazement, with simple maneuvers and tricks, I could just slip out and I immediately felt a great relief. Just as I experienced the feeling of relief I woke up and found hat my head felt like it had been stuck and had been squeezed from all sides, exactly like during my birth process. Shortly after I woke up, the memory of three events gradually came up in my mind. They were all about fines, forced payments, and that I seemed to experience authoritarian behavior by police officers. These events took place between 1956 and 1995. 

The most-recent event, I remembered first. My daughter, my wife and I were driving in a French-registered company car, from Metz in France to Spain, when the French gendarmerie stopped me for speeding (150 km/h) and required reasonable fines (500 FFR), which would be paid in cash on the spot. My reaction, however, was not reasonable. On the contrary, it was explosive and it’s a miracle that I was not arrested for the contempt I showed the officers and I lied when I said that I had no money to pay with. I was emotionally, at the sight of police officers, who stopped me and by their demands for immediate payment, moved back in time to my life-threatening birth. However, with police familiar with French temperament and a smooth conduct of my wife we could pay with credit card, and I came out of my dramatic 1st line feeling and could continue the journey.

The other police-related memory that ran up occurred when I and GL, my wife, in 1979 was en route from Fort Collins to Boulder, Colorado. We drove our little European Ford Fiesta, which our American friends thought looked and sounded like a sewing machine.Two big police cars with sirens and lights turned approached from behind and my wife, who fortunately was driving, slowed down the speed to let the police cars pass. Only one of the police cars passed by and drove narrowly, and recklessly in front of us while the other lay close behind us. It was apparently us that they were after. They claimed that we had run too fast, and we were forced out of the car with our legs spread apart, hands on the car roof and our backs against the police while they searched us. With the sheriffs’ drawn guns, there was no room for unpleasant reactions on my part. Then we had to run after a police car to the nearest post office and pay the modest fine of 25. $. The economical impact was easily digestible. But I have never really been able to get over the mental rape that my first and only meeting with the American justice system meant.

The first trauma of police officers in a traffic context occurred when I was 16 years. I biked recklessly on the wrong side of the road and distracted an elderly lady who rode over and hit herself so seriously that she must be transported to a hospital. The accident happened just opposite Åkarps police station and within a few minutes, the police officer came on the street. I was questioned and registered, which forced me to, a few weeks later, meeting up in the district court in Dalby, where I could present myself as a summer practicing metalworker, to receive my judgment of 15-day fines of SEK 5, which I saw as reasonable. My anxiety that the elderly lady would be seriously damaged, and demand compensation, had been great. Fortunately, the woman recovered, and I was left off with a relatively mild shock and with an unprocessed memory of the event.

After the previous night’s dreams, and after the three police confrontations had spilled out of my memory, I went and worked out, and I felt strong and in good balance, almost euphoric. Then something happened in my brain and body. A deep sense of hallucinatory relief followed by a baby crying that pushed up from the depths where it had been trapped for more than seven decades.

Jan Johnsson

Proust, Janov and Eva!

Again, we have had a tragic example of, the thousands of years of repeated persecution of the Jews, this time in France. France is said to be the country in Europe with the largest Jewish population and a president, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose father was a Greek Jew. This was one of two impacts that occupied my mind when I went to bed last night. The second impression was the final sentence in Art’s Reflection about 

The Chemistry of Depression (How Memory Is Inscribed) : “Jules distressed to intellectualize and beat around the subject endlessly never getting to any point. In our last group, I said to Jules one sentence: “The bottom line, Jules.” He hesitated a split second, fell into my arms and shouted: “Help me - I hurt!” “.

My dreams last night have been about Jews in my life and the literary world that I am interested in. Anne, the little girl from my early childhood, whose parents came from German death camps in Poland, Art Janov and The Primal Therapy that changed my life, Abbe Bonnier my employer who made my years with Janov in LA possible, Marcel Proust whose life and written production currently enrich me. Other Jewish representatives like Freud, Madhoff, etc. swept by. As it happens in my dreams, I tried to understand. Often it’s about my epilepsy, my neurotic behavior (actions that do not correspond to real needs) and to understand how pain propels the neurotic actions.

In the background it is always my personal life story. For decades I lived as a prisoner of my pain which produced neurotic deformations and painkillers, in order for me to survive. My life was not understandable until I was introduced and connected to Art’s principles of “Evolution in Reverse”. Through a combination of talented genius and favourable circumstances, Art turned his youth filled with pain and lack of love and recognition, into an opportunity for us to understand the consequences of unmet needs and loveless fetal toxicity in both the literal and the transmitted sense. He has led us to a new therapy paradigm.

Marcel Proust takes presently very large space in my world of thoughts and then I’ve only just started reading him, and analysis on him. His short, brilliant literary life was to the brim full of symbols that represented his bottomless pain and unmet needs. I can best summarize the insights I have so far received by a quotation from Proust: “In reality, every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have experienced in himself. And  the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.”

The value of Art’s books and Reflections cannot be better expressed than by using Proust words. It is by reading about  other people’s anxiety, pain and trauma that we can become aware of and feel our own anxiety and our unmet needs that goes back to our early childhood or even to our life before birth.

Intellect, thoughts and words are often a major obstacle to accessing our feelings and nonverbal traumatic memories. However, with more than 70 years of my own memories of physical and mental anxiety and pain, coupled with 40 years of application of Art’s principles and generous guidance on how emotions can be relived, Proust’s intellectual pain sublimations can be extremely rewarding. Add to that I’m having the opportunity to discuss my impressions with a woman, who for more than 50 years ago made an indelible impression upon my young mind. That makes at least part of life intelligible although last night’s dreams were partly initiated by a tragic event in France. The joy is represented by the fact that Jules took his first step toward health!

Jan Johnsson

The Truth: Where is it?

Sunday, March 18, 2012

Art Janov's Reflection: The Truth: Where is it?

The simple truth is progressive, and that pertains to psychotherapy. The question is whose truth? Simple. The patient’s. Always. You won’t find it in the theories of the therapist nor in her techniques. As obvious as it seems, the truth always lies in the patient; that is why he comes to us, because the painful truth is there but he usually doesn’t know it and even when he does he does not know where it is or why. But if we never get to his truth there is no progress (progressive) in therapy. We are there to treat him and not our theories. We are not after cleverly designed statistical outcomes but biologic ones. Each treated patient is a kind of test and ultimate support of what we do. We learn from patients; not them from us. We are not the fountains of wisdom but students of the human mind, and we learn at the source. We don’t delve into books to find answers to our questions; we observe our patients. All we need to know they hold within. So long as they come to us for answers they force us to look into the wrong places; and the answer remains elusive. It is a mutual delusion. They trust us to have the answer, and we take it as a sacred trust that must be pursued. We are both wrong, deluded by the history of psychotherapy and by the zeitgeist.

Deluded by the pedestal we have been put on, deluded by the desperate need and pain of the patient, deluded by socially institutionalized consensus that we professionals are the holders of secret truths about the unconscious. When I see patients each day I feel like I am going to school, getting my maturity degree in humility, eager to learn what lies in her unconscious. She is the holder of sacred truths; we have only found the way to access them. If our delusions had not fooled us into a false role we all would have found ways for access. How about talking to the patient? Not pontificating which is so seductive. How about following the trail of feeling, probing because we are interested in her, not in our theory. We can’t teach interest. Neophytes often make mistakes because they are not truly interested, nor empathic. They want to get ahead—ambition is the enemy of feeling. Remember again, the simple truth is progressive, and it is the secret for progress in psychotherapy. It is a simple thing; the minute we try to get complex and brilliant we fail. The patient is not interested in our discourse; she wants to get well and so does he. And she holds the secret of her cure; and that is what patients have to understand. When they claim, “I am not getting anywhere,” and if we answer defensively--yes you are-- all is lost because that is also a feeling……not getting anywhere at birth could have been fatal. Patients need to know that we both go at the speed she can tolerate and no faster. We cannot hurry feelings; besides she dictates the pace, not us.

What a relief not to have to have the answers; what a relief not to be brilliant all of the time. I always ask my patients (not beginners) if I made a mistake because they now know themselves better than I. They sense the mistakes and we must leave the way open to be corrected; that is how we learn. No more the professorial pose, the measured speech and the implied brilliance in our insights. No more acting out being the protective father. Patients need to learn about their needs, not have them fulfilled in the office by the shrink. It is so tiring to be the all knowing, omniscient soul. We all can relax and the therapy will go swimmingly.

Jan Johnsson's comment:

The Truth: Where is it?

I saw the mail, read the above heading, and then I went for a long walk with my dog and saved the text until I returned home.

During the walk, I went through one of my usual mind games, mental exercises and debated what TRUTH meant to me, now and before and how it (I) had progressively changed it’s many interpretations. How my subjective truth had merged with the truth of other people (family members, friends, colleagues etc.) in neurotic games, which only lasted until my or my counterparts truth did not correspond to the needs that the passage of time brings with it by obvious reasons. 

From my personal life as well as from the literature which I have read, I prepared, during my walk, a number of devastating examples that questioned how the truth can be somewhere if there is no common universal truth. Over the years, I only knew one truth, my individual. I felt relaxed and well prepared when I came home to comment on Art’s Reflection...

After having read the text of the article a couple of times I was suddenly disarmed. As if Art had prepared the article, after having listened to my private debate during my walk. I could not find a single point where Art contradicted what he has described in his books and carried out in his role as a guide / therapist. The patients truth / needs, the secret of her cure, come first (of course within the framework of a number of practical rules that are obvious to both parties in a treatment relationship) anything else ends up in delusion.

The question that towers is if there are other therapists, besides Art Janov, who can achieve the same humble, unlimited self-confidence and can act with enough intuitive skills and authority?

Jan Johnsson