Freudians traditionally prescribe intensive sessions of therapy – sessions that can go on for years, even decades. Janov has a different answer: the only way to rid yourself of depression and anxiety, he argues, is to return to the state we were in when we first felt rejection: screaming, shouting, rolling around on the floor. Whatever it takes, get it all out.
"In psychoanalysis you have to be there for 30, 40 years, or until you die or whatever," says France Janov over the phone. "But in Primal, once we have restored the capacity of feeling for the patient – once they have what we call 'access' – our patients don't need us."
Primal Therapy originated out of a conversation Janov had with a patient in 1967 in a group therapy session about a strange performance the man had seen. The performer spent much of the show shouting "mama!" at the audience and encouraging them to join in, and before long the crowd was screaming and crying.
"I encouraged this young man to do the same," Janov writes. "He refused but I insisted. Finally he began to scream 'mama!', fell off the chair and was writhing in pain on the floor. It went on for a half hour, something I had never seen before. When he came out of it he touched the carpet and said, 'I can feel!' He felt different."
"I started talking about painful events in my childhood and I started crying about them, essentially," he says. "That was the process... about getting in touch with your feelings. It's a very down to earth, practical therapy when it's done right, within safe boundaries."
"It works very well with 'functioning neurotics' – that's another Janov phrase, I think," he says. "People who are able to cope with what life throws at them, but are pretty unhappy and keep making the same old mistakes... and basically have a life script that is self-defeating. Those kinds of people often do very well in Primal Therapy."
This is the thing to understand about Primal Therapy. If you're plagued by depression and anxiety, a general displeasure with life, the treatment could possibly help you: talking about your feelings and expressing emotions openly and honestly in a safe space is always a liberating experience.
The Experience of Primaling
During a primal, one makes contact with a past memory and the feeling connected with it, and has the experience of descending. A person "goes with" the feeling, lets it expand and become "big," surrenders to it, and gives in to her body-movements. In letting go, she is aware that she is really allowing feeling rather than blocking. A person often experiences oneself as lost in feeling, but at the same time there is a part of oneself "watching" as one primals. She knows she can come out of a feeling if she wants to; if the pain is too much, a person can "turn off." During feeling, one loses track of time. One feeling leads to another and, after a while, feelings seem to emerge involuntarily.
When a person makes contact with a feeling, there is often a sense of "rightness" about it, as if one has arrived at something true and real. Having contacted a feeling, a primaler often experiences the emergence of sudden insights. The content of memories experienced during a primal session often has to do with being small and helpless, and being in the presence of one or both parents. At the end of a cycle one tends to feel lighter, as if having given up a weight. At the conclusion of a session, the person has the sense of having truly made contact with their feelings--and thereby with their real self. The insights that then emerge are experienced as solid and indisputable.
The Global Experience of Primal Therapy A person experiences his primal process as a kind of "chipping away"--feeling old feelings in small "chunks." It is as if he is gradually giving up a heavy weight, and the more he gives up the lighter he feels. A primaler periodically experiences "plateaus" where he seems to be integrating what he has already experienced, rather than breaking new ground. The process as a whole is often experienced as an unfolding of the self. The pattern of primal feeling is generally perceived as cyclical rather than linear. Over time, however, one seems to deal with earlier and earlier material. The person often experiences the same feeling in the context of different memories, or in the context of the same memory but as if from a different "angle." As one experiences old feelings over and over, these feelings gradually seem to emerge less often in daily life and to be generally less prominent in one's consciousness.--
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