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

Can Somebody Be Both Intelligent, Honest And Psychotherapist At The Same Time?

Can somebody be both intelligent, honest and psychotherapist at the same time?

The Inventor of the Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse wrote in a blog: "Truth needs no defense except when that truth is more than the organism can integrate. That is why many therapists in the "booga booga" dominated, world live inside their defense. They no longer feel the truth of their pain.”  Therefore, I would like to know how “honesty” is defined between the 200.000 shrinks in the USA.          

My header is a paraphrase of an old joke I borrowed from a cancer scientist and author who experienced the difficult political reversals, with profound implications during 60/70ies in Hungary. Since I, as a Swede, was exposed to the same joke myself  in the United States, I will tell the “joke”:  

One can not be intelligent, honest and psychotherapist simultaneously. All two-combinations may occur, but never the three-combination. Being intelligent and psychotherapist, one was not honest. An honest psychotherapist is not regarded as intelligent and an intelligent and honest person would not be a psychotherapist.

A joke can ease a suffering but never dissolve repressed pain. The joke can make the repressed pain more bearable. Apart from the evolutionary repression of pain, explain how else we can accept each second to surround ourselves with lies so they fit into our lives. Mor or less sophisticated needs/neurosis/lies make us belong to a pattern, a culture, a faculty, a treatment etc. etc.

During many years of analysis and findings, which Alice Miller and professional colleagues conducted, there was an almost consistent pattern among those who studied psychoanalysis: They had a basically emotionally insecure mother. An unconscious, intuitive ability to feel and live with the parents' needs was a function that they, unknowingly, had internalized. This surrogate for love charged the child to fill a need valuable for its potential careers. It is no wonder that they, as adults, often chose to become psychotherapists. Without this childhood's fate, who could mobilize interest to days on end seek to explore what goes on in their patients' unconscious?

Many, especially in the US, are hesitant to accept the truth of evolution and at the end of the day, they prefer Genesis. That is their way, obeying to the fourth commandment, to forgive their parents for a loveless old-fashioned upbringing and unconsciously to go on with it. Fortunately, evolution is so rational and smart that it counteract our failures and abuses, however at a high fee = deep depression when we do not obey the law of life of love, touch, and attention. We understand when we see the official US statistics below:

Percentage of persons age 12 and over by depressive symptom severity 

and race and Hispanic origin:

Race and ethniticy          Depressive              Percent       Std.

                                        symptom severity                        error

_____________________________________________________

All persons                  
                                        No symptom             77,2            0.8

                                        Mild                          15,3             0.5

                                        Moderate                   4,7             0.3

                                        Severe                       2.9             0.2

Hispanic

                                        No symptom               73.9           1.3

                                        Mild                             16.7           0.8

                                        Moderate                      5.7           0.6

                                        Severe                          3,7           0.5

Non-Hispanic black

                                         No symptom              73,2            1.0

                                         Mild                            17.1            0.7

                                         Moderate                     5.6            0.4

                                         Severe                         4.1            0.5

Non-Hispanic white

                                          No symptom               78.5           1.0

                                          Mild                             14.6           0.7

                                          Moderate                      4.3           0.4

                                          Severe                          2.6           0.3

______________________________________________________

This statistic if from the economically richest country in the world. With a population of 322.000.000, that makes 20.000.000 people with moderate or severe depressive symptoms. Add to that 40.000.000 people with mild symptoms.

I admire Dr. Janov that he continues his dream  / obsession of a general feeling / demethylation therapy. 50 years after his breakthrough and improvements in the Primal Principle, the situation in the world, when it comes to mental suffering and repressed pain, is certainly no better. However, how can 200.000 shrinks look themselves into their eyes when they judge their professional contribution in the light of the above statistics. The shrinks no. 1 supporter, the pharmacuetical industry, of course, sees my question as an insult. And so does all those who receive their paychecks from them.

My suspicion of the honesty of these 200.000 shrinks (with few exceptions) is challenging. They no longer feel the truth of their own pain. They are evolutionary prison guards in the treadmill of pain. They have in many cases given up their original psychotherapeutic ambitions and turned into prescription writers.

Jan Johnsson

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 !