First of all I have a hard time understanding the information presented on that site because of its structure and layout bloopers. And the random reaching out to a variety of irrelevant scientific studies, including the bogus statements of Loftus, did not much for me to be convinced.
The criticism towards Primal Therapy is valid but it's criticism that applies to all forms of therapy. Jeffrey Masson wrote a whole book about it (Against Therapy). I think it's fair to say that institutionalized therapy has been a failure in our society. Especially when you promote a therapy that cures neurosis of which 99 percent of the populations suffers from.
Alice Miller's criticism in Banned Knowledge of Arthur Janov's Primal Center is also valid.
What makes a person decide to go to a therapist? He or she hopes to be helped to relieve the suffering that person experiences. Repressed pain is a real phenomenon and it's real pain. Why does a person pay a lot of money to a therapist? Because it creates the illusion that the responsibility lies with him. If I buy a service, for example a meal in a restaurant, I expect that I don't have to do anything but eat. To avoid the repressed pain, which is stored in our body and our whole nervous system, we seek out people and systems that will continue that avoiding. It's the same with Primal Therapy. If you want to have a person listen to you for 1 hour a week, why not give the money to your local homeless person. He or she'll gladly listen to you for more than an hour. But these people seeking therapy want an authority figure to be listened to and the whole parent-repeat pattern takes over. When a person comes closer to his or her pain, it gets worse. You feel worse. But feeling is essential and it's a process that needs to be continued, not for 20 years, but to get to the full expression of the pain. During that phase most of the damage can be done if the situation is not right.
That said, Janov did not invent pain. This pain is showing and it can be traced to an original event in one's life. That is easier said than done and we all have our own experiences how we denied it by intellectual cover-ups. I used to explain in detail about the discoveries of Janov to a girl I was in love with, in my early twenties, not realizing I was trying to convince a deeply depressed person to start living again. Just like I did as a kid with my mother. The feelings I experienced were very intense but never again I struggled to have a depressed woman trying to like me.
Janov's books have been very valuable to me but so have others. If anyone expect to get all the answers and all the cures from one author or from one therapy, is in another form of denial. And denial is the strongest and always underestimated factor when it comes to human behavior.
And the Primal Center being a cult? Janov's newest book in planning called
Beyond Belief seems to tackle that first hand. From his website:
Beyond belief!
under consideration by publishers
This book examines what forces in us drive us to believe in mystics, healers and gurus. What unconscious impulses lead us to join cults, and reveals how feelings become beliefs in the brain. Dr. Janov discusses all of this through the autobiographies of patients who have lived it. He also examines how the government functions as a cult with the same dynamics as any cult leader from Jim Jones to Rajneesh and to Ben laden.
There is a chapter on the born again, conversion experience and why that happens. Another on what makes a leader or healer and what makes a follower. He cites many research studies on how thinking something will kill pain actually does, and why that happens. He analyzes belief systems and how they function to keep us comfortable. That the brain doesn?t care if it is Islam, the Republican Party or ?the secret,? it all works the same in the brain. What he points out is that the thought of a deity makes us believe in it whereas it is the thought itself that relieves and soothes us.
This is the first thorough account of how beliefs work in the brain to bring us comfort and calm. But it is a spurious calm since there is a seething caldron of pain that lies below beliefs that will make us sick and shorten our lives.
As always there's plenty of material to talk about. I agree that cultism is present in our ordinary society, in regular schools, offices or factories. You'll see it everywhere. People are depressed, they harm themselves, they harm the environment, they harm children and animals, they commit suicide.
Dennis
Again, all what is written here is my opinion, not general facts.