Therapy unleashed ‘primal scream’
Arthur Janov, the psychologist who created, practised and preached primal therapy, a sensation of the 1970s in which patients were coached to let out sobs or screams as they relived childhood trauma in a quest to overcome neurosis, died Oct. 1 at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 93.
The cause was respiratory arrest following a stroke, his wife, France Janov, told the Associated Press.
Through his treatment of celebrities — among them entertainers John Lennon, Yoko Ono and James Earl Jones — Janov became a celebrity in his own right beginning in the 1970s.
In a best-selling book, and in appearances on such television programs as The Dick Cavett Show, he converted curious onlookers to committed followers with an enticingly simple explanation of psychological ailments, and what he billed as a nearsurefire way of resolving them.
His debut book, The Primal Scream, was published in 1970 and sold more than one million copies. In that and subsequent volumes, he laid out his theory of Primal Pain, a term he rendered in capital letters.
If a baby suffers unduly during birth, or if his or her basic needs of food, warmth, love and stimulation are not met during infancy, that child may grow up and develop neuroses or other ills. They might include addiction, schizophrenia, sexual dysfunction, psoriasis, menstrual cramps and homosexuality, he wrote, despite the rapidly evolving understanding among doctors that homosexuality is not an illness.
To resolve Primal Pain, Janov invited patients to re- gress to childhood. His offices included cribs and toys. Patients were permitted or encouraged to suck their thumbs. Only once they have reached their former infant state might they access the Primal Pain that they had repressed.
His therapy became popularly known as “primal scream therapy” for the manner in which patients sometimes released that pain — through shouts such as “Daddy, be nice!” or “I hate you, I hate you!” Janov said his work was often misrepresented and reduced to screams, when in fact the release might instead take place through writhing or crying.
Reporting remarkable success rates, Janov declared his treatment “the most important discovery of the 20th century.” Jones, the actor, told Newsweek that primal therapy had resolved his hemorrhoids and helped him to stop smoking. Pianist Roger Williams said the therapy cured him of the problem of cold hands.
Mental-health professionals were less enthusiastic. In 1977, Janov sued the publication Psychology Today for US$7.1 million in libel damages for describing primal therapy as “jabberwocky.”
“Janov has one card up his sleeve which few of us more skeptical therapists can match. He is absolutely sure that he is right,” Anthony Storr, a British psychiatrist and author, wrote in a 1972 New York Times review of Janov’s book The Primal Revolution. “Primal therapy is not only the best cure for neurosis, it is the only cure — a statement not only arrogant but demonstrably false.”
Storr acknowledged Janov had “made a lot of neurotics feel better,” but he attributed the success essentially to the power of suggestion.
“If people are told with complete certainty t hat their symptoms are due to early parental neglect, that … screaming their heads off about it will cure them,” Storr wrote, “then a large number of people will recall such infantile traumas, and will scream their heads off with benefit.”
Janov, however, promised that any patient who has “relieved Primal Pains and interpreted their meaning for himself will never need therapy again.”
He counted himself among its beneficiaries.
Arthur Janov, a son of Russian immigrants, was born in Los Angeles on Aug. 21, 1924. He described his father, a butcher and truck driver, and his mother as “indifferent parents who didn’t care about kids.”
“The great favour they did me was to give me enough pain to discover the role of pain,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in 1993.
After navy service during the Second World War, he received a bachelor’s degree, followed by a master’s degree in psychiatric social work, from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1960, he received a PhD in psychology from Claremont Graduate University in California.
Janovh ad practise d psychology for nearly two decades when, during a session, a young patient emitted what Janov described as a “piercing, deathlike scream.” Janov had the intuition to invite the patient to call out for his parents. The breakthrough he said the patient experienced led him to develop the full regimen of primal therapy.
He founded his Southern California clinic in 1968. By the early 1990s, he commanded as much as $ 5,000 for treatment. The clinic remains in operation, although Janov said he looked forward to a time when it would not be necessary.
“The greatest hoax of the 20th century is psychiatry,” he told Newsweek in 1971. “In the future, there will be no need for a field called psychology. Add we would need only 20 per cent of the present medical profession since 80 per cent of all ailments would be cured by primal therapy.”
Janov emphasized his treatment was not only for the well- to- do. “If you’re plagued by feelings you can’t understand, you’re unhappy with your life or you have physical symptoms that won’t go away, these are all signs of Primal Pain,” he once said.
As for his treatment, it “is not a celebrity therapy,” he said. “It’s for people who are suffering.”