The scream heard ’round the world
Psychologist’s treatment was a touchstone of ’70s and drew such devotees as John Lennon, Yoko Ono
Arthur Janov was a California psychotherapist variously called a messiah and a mountebank for his development of primal scream therapy — a treatment he maintained could cure ailments from depression and alcoholism to ulcers, epilepsy and asthma, not to mention bring about world peace.
Aclinical psychologist, Janov conceived primal therapy, as his method is formally known, after an epiphany in the late-1960s. He introduced it to the world with his first book, The Primal Scream, published by G.P. Putnam’s Sons in 1970. The book attracted wide attention in newspapers and magazines and made a celebrity of Janov, who became a ubiquitous presence on the talk-show circuit.
Primal therapy became a touchstone of ’70s culture, especially after it drew a stream of luminary devotees to Janov’s Los Angeles treatment centre, the Primal Institute, among them John Lennon, Yoko Ono, James Earl Jones and pianist Roger Williams.
“Few treatments have been more dramatic, more highly touted or quicker to catch on than primal therapy,” the Los Angeles Times wrote in 1971.
The therapy’s premise was simple: All adult neurosis — and with “neurosis” Janov cast a wide net — stemmed from repressed infant and early-childhood trauma at the hands of one’s parents.
He called this trauma “primal pain,” and it was manifest, he said, in a cornucopia of ills that could include a variety of mood disorders as well as heart disease, high blood pressure, ulcerative colitis, drug addiction and stuttering.
He also listed homosexuality among the ailments the therapy could “cure,” and continued to list it long after the American Psychiatric Association declassified it as a psychiatric disorder in 1973.
Janov maintained that the way to re- lieve primal pain — and cure its associated ills — was to relive it via primal therapy, which entailed a regressive return to those distressing, now-accessible early memories.
Primal therapy was in many ways of a piece with its time. The quest for happiness amid postwar suburban anomie had already spawned Dianetics, the metaphysical movement first propounded in 1950 by L. Ron Hubbard, who four years later rebranded it as Scientology.
Psychologists questioned the book’s assertions from the beginning. They cited, among other issues, the unverifiable nature of its central claim of the existence of primal pain and the lack of independent, controlled studies demonstrating the therapy’s effectiveness.
But the rhapsodic public endorsement of Lennon, who, with his wife, Ono, underwent primal therapy with Janov in 1970, caused The Primal Scream to be heard ’round the world.