Art Janov, one of the pioneers of fetal and early infant experiences and future mental health issues, offers a robust vision of how the earliest traumas of life can percolate through the brains, minds and lives of individuals. He focuses on both the shifting tides of brain emotional systems and the life-long consequences that can result, as well as the novel interventions, and clinical understanding, that need to be implemented in order to bring about the brain-mind changes that can restore affective equanimity. The transitions from feelings of persistent affective turmoil to psychological wholeness, requires both an understanding of the brain changes and a therapist that can work with the affective mind at primary-process levels. Life Before Birth, is a manifesto that provides a robust argument for increasing attention to the neuro-mental lives of fetuses and infants, and the widespread ramifications on mental health if we do not. Without an accurate developmental history of troubled minds, coordinated with a recognition of the primal emotional powers of the lowest ancestral regions of the human brain, therapists will be lost in their attempt to restore psychological balance.
Jaak Panksepp, Ph.D.
Bailey Endowed Chair of Animal Well Being Science
Washington State University
Dr. Janov’s essential insight—that our earliest experiences strongly influence later well being—is no longer in doubt. Thanks to advances in neuroscience, immunology, and epigenetics, we can now see some of the mechanisms of action at the heart of these developmental processes. His long-held belief that the brain, human development, and psychological well being need to studied in the context of evolution—from the brainstem up—now lies at the heart of the integration of neuroscience and psychotherapy.
Grounded in these two principles, Dr. Janov continues to explore the lifelong impact of prenatal, birth, and early experiences on our brains and minds. Simultaneously “old school” and revolutionary, he synthesizes traditional psychodynamic theories with cutting-edge science while consistently highlighting the limitations of a strict, “top-down” talking cure. Whether or not you agree with his philosophical assumptions, therapeutic practices, or theoretical conclusions, I promise you an interesting and thought-provoking journey.
Lou Cozolino, PsyD, Professor of Psychology, Pepperdine University
In Life Before Birth Dr. Arthur Janov illuminates the sources of much that happens during life after birth. Lucidly, the pioneer of primal therapy provides the scientific rationale for treatments that take us through our original, non-verbal memories—to essential depths of experience that the superficial cognitive-behavioral modalities currently in fashion cannot possibly touch, let alone transform.
Gabor Maté MD, author of In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
An expansive analysis! This book attempts to explain the impact of critical developmental windows in the past, implores us to improve the lives of pregnant women in the present, and has implications for understanding our children, ourselves, and our collective future. I’m not sure whether primal therapy works or not, but it certainly deserves systematic testing in well-designed, assessor-blinded, randomized controlled clinical trials.
K.J.S. Anand, MBBS, D. Phil, FAACP, FCCM, FRCPCH, Professor of Pediatrics, Anesthesiology, Anatomy & Neurobiology, Senior Scholar, Center for Excellence in Faith and Health, Methodist Le Bonheur Healthcare System
A baby's brain grows more while in the womb than at any time in a child's life. Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script That Rules Our Lives is a valuable guide to creating healthier babies and offers insight into healing our early primal wounds. Dr. Janov integrates the most recent scientific research about prenatal development with the psychobiological reality that these early experiences do cast a long shadow over our entire lifespan. With a wealth of experience and a history of successful psychotherapeutic treatment, Dr. Janov is well positioned to speak with clarity and precision on a topic that remains critically important.
Paula Thomson, PsyD, Associate Professor, California State University, Northridge & Professor Emeritus, York University
"I am enthralled.
Dr. Janov has crafted a compelling and prophetic opus that could rightly dictate PhD thesis topics for decades to come. Devoid of any "New Age" pseudoscience,
this work never strays from scientific orthodoxy and yet is perfectly accessible and
downright fascinating to any lay person interested in the mysteries of the human psyche."
Dr. Bernard Park, MD, MPH
His new book “Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” shows that primal therapy, the lower-brain therapeutic method popularized in the 1970’s international bestseller “Primal Scream” and his early work with John Lennon, may help alleviate depression and anxiety disorders, normalize blood pressure and serotonin levels, and improve the functioning of the immune system.
One of the book’s most intriguing theories is that fetal imprinting, an evolutionary strategy to prepare children to cope with life, establishes a permanent set-point in a child's physiology. Baby's born to mothers highly anxious during pregnancy, whether from war, natural disasters, failed marriages, or other stressful life conditions, may thus be prone to mental illness and brain dysfunction later in life. Early traumatic events such as low oxygen at birth, painkillers and antidepressants administered to the mother during pregnancy, poor maternal nutrition, and a lack of parental affection in the first years of life may compound the effect.
In making the case for a brand-new, unified field theory of psychotherapy, Dr. Janov weaves together the evolutionary theories of Jean Baptiste Larmarck, the fetal development studies of Vivette Glover and K.J.S. Anand, and fascinating new research by the psychiatrist Elissa Epel suggesting that telomeres—a region of repetitive DNA critical in predicting life expectancy—may be significantly altered during pregnancy.
After explaining how hormonal and neurologic processes in the womb provide a blueprint for later mental illness and disease, Dr. Janov charts a revolutionary new course for psychotherapy. He provides a sharp critique of cognitive behavioral therapy, psychoanalysis, and other popular “talk therapy” models for treating addiction and mental illness, which he argues do not reach the limbic system and brainstem, where the effects of early trauma are registered in the nervous system.
“Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script that Rules Our Lives” is scheduled to be published by NTI Upstream in October 2011, and has tremendous implications for the future of modern psychology, pediatrics, pregnancy, and women’s health.
Editor
Art,
ReplyDeleteIf those who develop Alzheimer's... earlier in life had a satisfied emotional development… one can assume that the emotional effect would prove to be different for later Alzheimer's... I mean... if the limbic system and neo cortex were in tune with each other they would not have lost touch with the here and now because the feeling and thought would be in a process with each other. But wait now ... if we as fetuses and small child would have had a positive emotional process into adulthood we would never developed Alzheimer's... but the hypothesis is probably right… they would probably "know who they are and where they belong" if that were the case?
Frank
i guess alzheimers victims use subcortical defenses to block triggered memories. resonance doesn't always begin in the cortex does it?
ReplyDeleteThat's interesting, Richard. I have thought before that the defense system must evolve with the individual's development, and when you lose the neocortex the earlier defense system must kick in. The primal center may not know much about the defense system of the child because they always work with adults.
DeleteAndrew: We work with adults who are often in their childhood. art
DeleteRichard: Read "Life Before Birth" again on resonance. It includes all three levels art
DeleteAndrew: Don't be so sure. art
Deleteart, how do alzheimers victims block triggered memories? are their traumatic memories triggered at all? do they need a defense system? does the brain damage create confusion that acts as a defense system? would i be more consciously aware....more feeling if i 'suffered' from alzheimers? perhaps alzheimers victims experience the same kind of stress that i do - the stress generated by the constant pressure coming from trapped memories, but they don't experience those moments of elevated stress - the stress caused by TRIGGERED pain on the rise. and for that reason, along with the fact that they have stronger here-and-now feelings due to the lack of repression imposed by a cortex, they have a higher quality of life. higher than mine.
Deletehave you looked into the eyes of many alzheimers 'victims'? can you see who is looking back at you? are they fully awake? can they feel you?
Richard: OK, now ask specialists on the subject. I write about what I know and Azheimers is not really one of them as there those who devote their lives to its studies. art
DeleteRichard, allow me, if you will, to answer your questions!
DeleteWhen the cortex seems to disappear, it does not block feelings in the first place. It is the stem, which I have long maintained on this forum, which controls the cortex and uses the cortex to block or even create reasonings to deceive and make the whole brain feel better, even if it is not really better. The stem uses the cortex to kill pain or block it. Art would have you believe (that is my impression) that the cortex actually rules the stem, sometimes. I have always disagreed with that.
Your question highlight why what I say makes more sense. The instinctive stem is always in charge – 24/7/365.24 !
So pain does not come up, since the paths to the cortex are rotted away or whatever. I do not know enough about Alzheimers myself, and defer to that as Art does. But if you have ever met anyone without “brakes,” as I call them, those who act or feel without thinking, these are those who have leaky gates, so that when the stem turns gates on, they do not fully work. Sometimes, I suspect, the stem stops sending certain signals and just continues the regular functions, with the pain mixed in.
Its all in the stem, my friend, regardless of what anyone else hypothesizes. Research into mind control might be a fascinating subject for you to look into, for far more depth on brain abilities and manipulation and how it works. Just saying ;-)
We need to be enlightened, and what you have written, Art, is good to know and interesting. I am also glad to read that you will still be writing; I think it's important.
ReplyDeleteBeachcoast7
Hi,
ReplyDeleteMy Mum is now living in a home for the terminally demented. She won't take an Alzheimers test but that's irrelevant.
Personally speaking I feel there are some people who show symptoms of 'mental degeneration' from quite an early age due to what I now understand as deeply repressed birth and/or gestational trauma. My mum has been scatty and nutty and capricious for donkeys' years; her behaviour now is just an extension of what she was like 4o years ago.
If you didn't know there's now a legitimate diagnosis for decision fatigue. . . stress. . . tension and the witholding of feelings in difficult group situations. This is like a pressure cooker. I know because I ran a small company with the wrong people who left all the decisions to me and I continued till I broke down and cried.
If I don't get dementia it will be because I break down and cry, deeply for hours.
When I see some of these people I know showing worrying symptoms (formerly close to me, one aged only 9yrs and still very close to me) and talk to them about history I see that none of them keep a journal, none can remember what happened yesterday, many don't know what day it is and all freak out or dissociate at the slightest pressure to perform. I can rely on none of them to stick to what they said they were going to do and I know for sure that they all got birth trauma or worse because they all told me so anyway. We were all New Age trainee Therapists! (apart from the 9yr old one, though she is a better therapist than any of the so called adults) . . . The 9yr old one I am very sure of her trauma because she is my daughter and I was there when she was born and she was blue and now she is showing all those symptoms, can't concentrate, doesn't know what day it is, can't remember what happened this morning, yesterday etc.
It's the pressure generated by the force of the skewed set points under massive repression. It fries your neocortical brain first because that's where the you you think you are thinks about the who you think you are. It's all thinking and therefore ephemeral and therefore easiest to wipe and distort. . . The further back we go the more the memories are emotional and imprinted emotionally, that seems to be a more solid part of the human we believe we are. Thus as Art says: "Last in, first out".
Or as Robert Nestor Marley sang: "Once a man and twice a child". . .
How very f*****g true. . .
Paul G.
Dear Art, here is a proof of heaven (usually hell) that you may find interesting: If third line is the first to go when we get old, it may also be the first (outer brain) to go when we die. And the sense of time may undergo a nonlinear dilation, so that one second increasingly feels like a minute or like a day, etc. In that sense, we will indeed live an eternal afterlife which will be hell if (like most of us) we have unresolved pain, or heaven otherwise, as we get decomposed into intellect-free mammals, salamanders and eventually a dust of single dying cells. I know that, in that sense, I will go to "hell," but the only thing that consoles me is that the person that will undergo this eternal suffering will not be who I think I am right now.
ReplyDeleteHi Philip,
DeleteThis sounds like a version of: "your whole life flashes past you". . .
-But in reverse order.
Paul G.
I wish I could break down and cry for hours. I feel like crying today because I have a hospital appointment tomorrow to deal with what looks like a skin cancer. Damn it, I was hoping that starting Primal Therapy would mean i did not have to face this. The trouble is that because no-one in our God forsaken NHS took my protestations seriously for years all the anger and rage has probably cooked my Brain and messed up my immune system.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to get Altzeimers, as the way Art describes it it's just wandering round in some fluffy cotton wool. I want to feel and think. I want to bloody well be able to remember names the way I did before I went to LA. I guess my first line is closer to the surface. I went to see my new Doctor yesterday and after showing him my skin lesion also told him about my Dad abusing me and asked for some beta blockers. He just said OK I am sorry to hear that your father abused you (he just believed me) and then wrote out a prescription. I explained about going to LA and doing Primal Therapy and he seemed quite interested. I walked out in shock at the acceptance. It was brilliant. My last Doctor was shit.
A friend came to stay this weekend and asked me how I was handling all the Jimmy Saville stuff and it really threw me. His concern and total belief in me was brilliant. I told him some of the other suspiscions I had about my Dad and he did'nt seem phased. "Why would'nt people believe you" he said. My wife said it looked like it really threw me. It caused me to feel shakey and tearful. Someone just believing me. If someone had believed me 25 years ago maybe less of my Brain would have been fried and I would'nt be so scared of being a grinning idiot later in life. My Grandmother had Altzeimers and her life was painful. She lashed out at me as a 10 year old Boy clouting me round the head, snapped at my little sister and was generally quite horrible. I am sure she had a bloody awful violent and abuse childhood. It still was'nt pretty when her Brain collapsed in on itself.
Having my Skype session soon. Finding the whole thing difficult due to the distance. Should I take a tablet or not? I just want to feel and think and be WHOLE!!!!!
Art,
ReplyDeleteThe concept of God is an attempt to save our life for what then was life threatening... so if we just... without a primal therapeutic process removes God then we have an even more crazy and schizophrenic world.
Prayer for God's grace is like our appeal to our mom and dad... to be loved for who we are... an cognitiv attempt to protect us against life-threatening emotional memories... ALONE without a mom and dad... who became god.
Frank
Dear Philip,
ReplyDeleteI hope you won't be too upset but scientists including Dr Janov believes that when you are about to die your brain scans all the memories that have been engraved about life threatening experiences in order to find a clue about how to react. That's why some people describes that their life was moving fastly before "their eyes" (I am not sure about how to put it in english but it's how we say it in french).
Otherwise if you become psychotic you might find that time is going slower and that all the colors of life are much more brighter. You will see smiling faces, listen carefully to little children and see all the beauty of life at the same time. You will realised that the sun is the only light that matters in the end, that it runs our days and that it's the only thing worth racing against when you gave up wearing a watch.
yeah art
DeleteHi,
Deletethat also explains a lot about 'hyper-vigilant' behaviours.
Paul G.
Hi Yann
DeleteI like the thing about why our life flashes past our eye's when we are about to die or maybe when we think we are about to die. Perhaps that is why after a particularly traumatic event we start getting in touch with other events we had forgotten in our lives. Perhaps that is why I remembered all kinds of events from life after a very traumatic event in 2005. Perhaps that is why people with PTSD keep remembering the actual event but reacting from early parts of our lives.
How can we misunderstand anxiety... its real reason... that something must be the cause of it? Everything... except the primal cause is "proven"... everything except the "journey" into why... what a tragedy.
ReplyDeleteThere is nothing as obvious as symptoms... that something is wrong… a reason till why. We need “only" step on the journey and follow along. No… it's not that simple… but with an escort from experienced... the journey seams possible.
What a trip it must be... only we passed the station of signs to "anywhere" then there is just we... we by our self... we the pain itself.
Really! we are offered to heal of the symptoms it self only if we can listening to "the right brain"... the problem is we do not understand that. Our thoughts are busy by other sentences... sentences away from its cause. This is a convincing factor… the neo cortex evolved for just survival... not a flourishing life. Neo cortex do not interpret the signal for its cause itself… it chooses another sentence. This is why we need help... help to convince neo cortex about a right cause.
Frank