UPDATED FOR 2020: The Primal Scream — I remember this book being all the rage when it was published in 1970, even though at the time I had just started high school. Everyone was talking about the book, by Arthur Janov, and the therapy he developed, called primal therapy.
For me, that was the end of it. I never read the book. I never heard anything more about Arthur Janov. I haven’t thought about Primal Scream or primal therapy in more than 40 years, until a Lovefraud reader brought it up.
The reader sent me a link to an article on Arthur Janov’s blog. (He was alive until recently. Janov died in 2017 at the age of 93.) The article was is entitled Why we need safety, and it was published on June 30, 2014. I invite you to read it.
The link below will take you to Janov’s blog, but not directly to the article. You can click the link in the Blog Archive on the right.
Releasing trauma
In the article, Janov explains how amoeba placed in water contaminated with ink will absorb the dirty water. Then, when the amoeba are placed in clean water, they discharge the black ink. They are in a place where they can purify themselves, so they do.
What is the correlation to people? Janov says people need a welcoming environment to get rid of all the pain inside. But he believes conventional therapy may not always provide it. He writes:
That is exactly what is missing in psychotherapy. First, a notion of all the tears inside that must be experienced, and secondly, the need to provide an environment where those tears can be let out in full force.
He goes on to write,
Psychotherapy that evades and avoids emotions makes the patient sicker. Tears must emanate from felt pain, not as an intellectual exercise, not as directed by a well-meaning counselor, but tears that arrive automatically when the actual early memory is evoked.
Janov’s basic premise is that early traumas felt as a fetus in the womb or as a small child get trapped in the body. Releasing the early traumas allows a person to heal.
So Janov developed “primal therapy.” Here is how he explains it on his website, PrimalTherapy.com:
What is Primal Therapy?
Painful things happen to nearly all of us early in life that get imprinted in all our systems which carry the memory forward — making our lives miserable. It is the cause of depression, phobias, panic and anxiety attacks and a whole host of symptoms that add to the misery. We have found a way into those early emotional archives and have learned to have access to those memories, to dredge them up from the unconscious, allowing us to re-experience them in the present, integrate them and no longer be driven by the unconscious.
Pain to vulnerability
Plenty of people don’t like Arthur Janov’s primal therapy. In fact, according to Wikipedia, primal therapy is listed in one book called Crazy Therapies and another book called Insane Therapy.
But I do think there is validity to Janov’s key point: Emotional pain from prior experiences can get stuck within us, causing us psychological and emotional problems, and even physical illness.
In addition to this, I also believe emotional pain from prior experiences makes us susceptible to sociopaths.
This can happen in a multitude of ways. Perhaps our parents were abusive, neglectful, or simply too busy to provide us with the attention and love that we needed. Perhaps we were abused or humiliated by siblings or other family members. Perhaps we were betrayed by romantic partners that we encountered before the sociopath.
All of these situations create vulnerabilities. Sociopaths sense vulnerabilities like sharks sense blood in the water. They identify our vulnerabilities and use them to hook us. You all know what happens after that.
Deep healing and the primal scream
The pain we experience because of sociopaths — betrayal, disappointment, grief — is profound. It sears us to the center of our souls.
Then it stays there — creating emotional havoc until we get the pain out of our system.
Here’s where I agree with some of Janov’s ideas. I believe that in order to really purge the pain that’s deep within us, we need to let it rip — crying, wailing, stomping our feet. (My personal favorite for releasing pent-up anger was envisioning my ex-husband’s face on a pillow and beating it until I collapsed.)
Now, this is not pretty, and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to do it in front of your friends or family, because they will want you to stop. In fact, many therapists may not be comfortable in this situation.
So do it alone. When you don’t have to worry about holding yourself together for someone else’s benefit, you can cry really hard, and that’s when you experience release.
As you do this, you may suddenly feel a direct emotional connection between the pain caused by the sociopath and memories of pain from your past. This is good. This means you’re accessing the root of the problem, those earlier betrayals and disappointments that were still stuck within you.
So is this Janov’s primal scream? I don’t know. But I believe that by releasing all the pain, even the early pain, you’ll open yourself up for a really deep and profound healing. I know I did.
Lovefraud originally published this article on July 21, 2014.
Trying to protect a child from parental alienation
Dear Donna,
I totally agree with you that you need to get the anger, hurt and disappointment out. What I found very helpful was to scream. Sometimes my daugther and I would leave home in the mornings, after my spath’s explosion over something stupid, and once we were in the car and around the corner from home, we would look at each other, count to 3, and then just scream as loud as we could. Then we were able to laugh about Spath’s behaviour, and not have our day ruined by him.
I wanted to share with everyone that I have hired a cranial sacral therapist who also does EMDR. She has worked for years with trauma survivors. After a free 1/2 hour consultation, I asked her if we could get started right away. She did 30 minutes with me and it was really really helpful. I would recommend this form of work for anyone who is stuck and/or who has experienced trauma and can’t get past it. For me, it’s the abandonment/betrayal issue I keep playing out. The good thing is that this form of therapy is not ongoing forever. She thinks it will take about 5 sessions total for me to get past this, and I believe her. Cranial sacral work is a form of energy work that can be hands-on and very gentle. It is body focused and involves helping you to ground yourself and feel safe while you’re experiencing the repressed emotions of a trauma.
In her experience, gentle movements and postures can be more effective than screaming to release anger or even rage. She feels that screaming often overloads the nervous system and creates a certain energy field. I would not have believed her until I experienced the work myself. I still think sometimes you need to just scream and rage. But even though I was experiencing some very deep rage to where my body was shaking, I was able to release it just by being able to feel it for an extended period. Pretty interesting stuff. Typically, when rage comes up I dissociate. That is my early defense mechanism. She guided me to feel it for very short periods of time, then to feel my feet on the ground and my body making contact with the massage table to calm down my nervous system and create a “safe” place to go when I feel overwhelmed. She was very intuitive in recognizing when I started dissociating.
I would like to learn how to do this work myself someday. As a massage therapist, it’s a good adjunct. She herself started as a massage therapist too, and that is her license to lay hands on people.
Two thumbs up for this work. Have not experienced the EMDR from her yet but will report back. I will say I feel much different and better since the 30 minutes.
Stargazer – it sounds fascinating. Please keep us posted.
With apologies, what I’m about to write is completely irrelevant to the topic of therapy, primal or otherwise.
One of several things I like about this site is that often, things posted here prompt my curiosity about some topic or other having nothing remotely to do with personality disorders. This can lead to interesting research and discoveries.
On this page what struck me was the thought that this painting of Edvard Munch’s is so striking that it must be among the most iconic and recognizable art works in the entire world. I don’t know much about art, but I could even recall the year this was painted, 1893.
I’m sure I remembered that because I wondered at the time if it symbolized the dawning of human anxiety and fear about what was shortly to come. Up to the end of the 19th century the world was pretty traditional in many ways. As far as there was change, in the long run it was usually change for the better. In medieval times change was so imperceptible over a person’s lifetime that most people regarded the world as static. In contrast, the Victorian era was an age of unparalleled progress at a rate never seen before or since. By the end of the century I dare say most people were optimistic that progress would continue, that the world could only go on getting better and better.
But not everybody, necessarily. And it wasn’t true. The twentieth century did bring progress of other kinds, but perils and catastrophes as well. “Progress” is founded on technology, but in the long term the benefits of technology are not without their costs, as we all know today. Earlier still, the new twentieth century was to bring social upheaval that was disconcerting to many, and a drastic political reshaping of the “civilized” world. Music and art themselves were about to change in ways that horrified some people, starting with Cubism in 1907. And there was uproar at the first performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring in 1913. It was a shocking contrast coming after the grace of Les Sylphides, based on Chopin’s work. Somebody once said that 1912 was “the last year anyone could believe in ‘progress’”–the year the Titanic went down. Most of all, within a mere two decades of The Scream, after a long period of relative peace (I emphasize “relative”), punctuated by brief conflicts, would come the most devastating war the world had ever known–to be followed by a worse war a generation later.
This is not to say the 1890s were a perfect decade. There were economic crises in the United States, and farming crises on both sides of the Atlantic. Some might have seen these troubles as harbingers of things to come. Others might have been alarmed by the pace of Victorian change itself–or feared that progress itself could never come without a cost, on the principle that “there is no free lunch.” There is truth in that. Still, most paintings of the era seem to be of pleasantly reassuring subjects. The Scream, almost on the threshold of the twentieth century, stands out as one of fear and terror. I couldn’t help wondering if it portrayed some prophetic intuition of the horrors to come.
Out of interest, I Googled the phrase “world’s most famous paintings” to see how Munch’s most celebrated work was ranked. I imagined it would stand among only a few: the of course, a handful of other Old Masters, a couple of Van Goghs, a Picasso or two, Dali, Whistler’s Mother…
It was my turn to be horrified. Among Google’s selection of no less that fifty-one of the “world’s most famous paintings,” The Scream was not included! I couldn’t believe it! They featured numerous paintings I’d never heard of myself–who on earth was “Wassily Kandinsky,” for a start?–but not that one! I know very well that selecting “the best” of anything is extremely subjective and a matter of differing tastes, not to mention fierce arguments. But this was a truly egregious omission.
Still, I dug a little further and immediately came across a site called Top 100 Masterpieces. That site had The Scream listed as Number Three!–after the Mona Lisa, the second (not surprisingly) being Van Gogh’s Starry Night. That one’s so famous that Don McLean even wrote a song about it.
It also listed some I thought more worthy of inclusion in Google’s selection, certainly better known that some of those there. For instance The Laughing Cavalier, Washington Crossing the Delaware, and Waterhouse’s Lady of Shalott. As for the last, while the absence of Pre-Raphaelites, compared with Impressionists and other schools, is a feature of Google’s selection, both collections have notable holes. There’s nothing in either one later than Picasso or Magritte; no soup cans from Andy Warhol for instance. Most curious of all is that I noticed nothing from the eighteenth century. It’s as if the civilized world laid down its brushes after Vermeer kicked the bucket in 1675 and didn’t pick them up again until Goya or someone really hit their stride after 1800. Just because the eighteenth century was dubbed the “Age of Reason,” did that mean it was devoid of art, amid other appeals to beauty and to the emotions? What happened to Gainsborough and Joshua Reynolds, just for starters?
Anyway, regardless of criticism, I’m sure we all know the saying that ”I don’t know much about art, but I know what I like.” I don’t know much about art either, but thanks to this short tour I do know a little more than I used to!
Thanks Redwald. I was in New York right before the pandemic started, and saw “Washington Crossing The Delaware” at the Met. It is MASSIVE! Seeing a photo of it in a book doesn’t begin to do it justice.