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
Dear Dr Janov. Sad it is and sad it will remain for ever. Wasted lives wasted love wasted time makes life the most precious gift we have left beauty love and friendship and then nothing.So many people unable to understand how good practices around birth and pregnancy is the key point to everything. It is becoming more and more complex and sophisticated. New technologies to meet people new technologies to have babies but old needs and old mistakes over and over again. Nietzsche realized more than a hundred years ago that everything was bound to come back again for ever not much as a kind of individual immortality but as our own mistakes pains joy failures success love sorrows both as feeling beings and species till we disappear. Life is a sparkling fire that aims at nothing but being enjoyed for the sake of it.
ReplyDeleteCorny I know, but sending you a cyber-hug :-)
ReplyDeleteRaindog, How sweet and I send you a real but ineffable hug. art
DeleteThis streamed on my Facebook feed JUST as I was telling someone how painful it all was and how I wish I would just be reincarnated the next time around as a doggie that is unconditionally loved. Laughing through the tears. I think the pain is rich rich fodder for artists to explore in their work IF they can stick with it and have the courage to delve deeply. I know for me it is.
DeleteBehind my thoughts in defense of myself... there I am... I small little Frank!
ReplyDeleteWhat actually makes us crazy it is that we do not get hold of the need... that we think more about the reactions we have (given symptoms to their cause) than to direct them to its real cause... the need little Frank has... the tears little Frank has closed inside of him self of fear... who so desperately needs to come to its expression... yes they do!
Our confused thoughts should long ago have the right to their cause but as long as the knowledge is so limited... we will also suffer the pains of "hell"
Frank
ReplyDeleteArt: your post resonated with a feeling of futility within me. It felt "negative" and that´s not a criticism. A feeling is a feeling is a feeling. At 91, maybe you have resigned yourself to some degree of permanent pain....My own feeling is reflected in the direction being taken by the modern form of capitalist organised society. Sadly, more and more, virtually the only thing valued in todays world is work. People are now viewed only as the modern capitalist system wants them to be viewed: as commodities, cyphers, valued only to the extent that they produce, and what they produce matters not, when it should be all that does matter. A slaughterhouse employee is socially approved of simply because he has a job, though he tortures and barbarically slaughters hundreds of sentient creatures each day. It´s not just ethics which are absent. Ethics, after all, are a derivative, the pathetic cortical remnant of what should be deep, compassion-driven-justice - and sadly, shrunken & reduced in todays amoral and hedonistic, me-centred world to the conclave of the new left. The dehumanisation of people into unfeeling robots at the service of the rulers of the day is not a modern phenomenon. It has taken on many forms throughout history: religious brainwashing/conditioning, the terrorism of the military state with its omnipresent agents and spies.......these we can look back on and smile knowingly and say things have changed, that we´re now free in body and in mind. But we´re not, because apart from around 11 years of our childhoods being robbed from us to programme us - with the full compliance of media and education-hypnotised parents - to become mere obedient robots whose sole function is to serve the Status Quo - we relate more and more now to and via electronic devices, and ever less to real people in situ, with all the organic, subtle, natural richness that involves. We no longer even have communities, because everywhere people are somewhere else via their mobiles and computers. So yes, I feel some sort of grief too, and whether or not is is from my past does not, in a sense, matter, because society is becoming more and more dehumanised, and the causes are too subtle and unlikely for most to understand. I grieve for the current generation of children. Not even their obedient, conformist parents help them, but feed them straight into the jaws of a monster which destroys their souls. "Do what the man tells you". Gary
Gary, I am discussing real hope which I make for me and my patients; for a better life. art
DeleteThank you Art. My time at the NY Institute, although foreshortened by it's closing and my decision to not move west and continue my therapy was a life changing time. I also feel that sense of waste and made the decision to be the father I wished I'd had. My work has been to be as conscious (feeling) as I can in knowing when I'm in the past when interacting with my daughter and now the grandchildren. My daughter has grown into a feeling mom and the grandchildren have happy lives as compared to my childhood. That has allowed me to find some solace knowing that I "broke the chain" as I call it. Thank you again.
ReplyDeleteTerrific. art
DeleteThough I'm grateful for much of what never would have been without therapy, I am equally saddened by my potential lost forever. I struggle daily to try and fulfill myself creatively since that was what was denied me the most along with being unloved. Because I rebelled constantly, I was ostracized and punished because I "acted out" knowing on some level that pretending to go along with the family neurosis would be the nail in the coffin for me.
ReplyDeleteI was already emotionally deadened from physical abuse, beaten by a father who could somehow not make me "buckle under." His own father hit him with his razor strap. He told me that if it was good enough for him then he would carry on the tradition hitting me with that same strap. Obviously a cyclical, generational history of abuse.
I burned it in the basement incinerator. I refused to give in and "go along to get along."
I could never explore what interested me and failed in school chronically. I didn't know what interested me and now can feel the pain that to them I was nothing. The feeling consistently was: " I can't think, I can't learn." My saving grace that finally brought me to therapy was that I would not give up or give in.
I now barely communicate with any of my siblings except minimally because there is nothing I want from them. Full circle. I was nothing. They are nothing to me. Damaged though I am, I can now pursue my creative interests in life and have a life. What a waste, indeed.
What’s a Waste?
ReplyDeleteOver the past few weeks, my childhood friend and I read aloud to each other from Alice Miller, Hermann Hesse and Georg Klein: We have analyzed and filtered our experiences through our interpretations of Arthur Janov, Ida Rolf and not least our own lifelong experiences of pain / success and sweet lies / clairvoyance. The decisive driving force in the choice of our activities has been: more than 60 years of mutual sympathy for each other (though sadly repressed for >50 years), my epilepsy and my / our understanding of Arthur Janovs "Primal Principle" that is, evolution’s systematic encapsulation / repression of all premature and unbearable pain, both physical and mental.
This morning when we woke up there was Art's Reflection "What a Waste" in our mailbox. After reading it a few times, so we agreed with Art about: "What a Waste"! However, it was not many minutes before I was filled with swirling thoughts / feelings of >70 years, which admittedly sympathized with Art, but which did not agree with him.
Dr. Janovs definition of "waste" felt too one-dimensional, transparent, and without wanting to see the world, evolution as it is. The evolutionary benefits / implications of Arts painful, loveless upbringing led, eventually, to The Primal Principal. This in turn has meant that I, and countless others, have been helped to break us out of our prisons of pain and demystify our symptoms, be safe and sound and to see our individual destinies with better lucidity. I have been able to better understand how evolution prioritize the human species' survival and to accept my mortality and mitigation as an individual.
Without experiential insight in The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse, I had not as well been able to integrate Alice Miller’s exploration of the Black, poisionous, Pedagogy. Without your collective wisdom and enlightenment I had thus not been able to understand / believe (as many still do not do!) that a criminal monster could emerge from an innocent little baby. Nor had I been able to understand how Imre Kertész, who (according to Georg Klein) also had a horrific childhood, developed a capability because of distorted emotions and repressions, as a teenager to endure death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and eventually give us a ruthless unemotional picture of the holocaust in his Nobel prize-winning book “Fateless".
The flashback which Dr. Janov partly feels like a personal "waste" has for me and many others led to insights that have become comprehensible through our own painful experiences. When I am capable, I feel them, they become multi-dimensional insights and conscious awareness. At first thought might episodes / periods be perceived as "waste". Overall, and viewed from a holistic perspective, they feel like an improvment / creation.
I end with a few verses from Inger Christensen's Requiem "The Butterfly Valley", which I highly recommend as one of the most beautiful creations of the fluctuations in the evolution / life.
Concealed by the perfume of mountains brush,
all blossoming is rooted in decay,
in tangle, shadow, and decomposition,
a labyrintine, wild insanity,
just as the butterfly in flight conceals
the insect body to which it is bound -
we see it as a flower flying up
not as the rank iconoclasm it is -
Jan Johnsson
Arthur Janov experiences "what a waste" and at the same time he means so much for so many people in the world.
DeleteFor me that's the biggest prove that nothing can compensate the missing love in your youth! The pain filled so many hours of your life: and that could have been filled with love/beautiful feelings/sensations..that's a waste!
Ingrid
Someone who wasn't ignorant might have been able to stop this "chain reaction" , but sadly parents just don't know, or is it that they don't want to know. Being born in the 1940's or earlier, parents have kids, and it's just like "Johnnie go out and play, you were born." Now kids are born and I think they are smothered not only by family, friends, but with all the technology gadgets given to them. Certainly, every kid,needs someone to encourage them if they show an interest in something. One has to be very sure as to how the child will be raised now, otherwise; people shouldn't consider even having any. Possibly one would have just been better off growing up in an orphanage (never knowing their parents) than to have neglectful, outright, unloving parents. It hurts the child at the time, and then the child grows up and feels worse, because they realize that maybe the parents just didn't know how to treat their child except the way they were treated. Quality is important, and one can only hope that when the neglected child grows up, that he or she is able to "turn things around". How, how can one possibly turn things around? He or she has to be a survivor, possibly one more time. They have to work at it, turn somewhere, possibly turn to someone for the guidance, turn to some belief if they are to succeed in life. If they don't seek out help, then they turn to themselves, because they are the most intelligent, trustworthy, reliable person to them. They know what they went through, and they probably come out all the stronger and better both mentally and physically for the lack of love they had in early life. Then when they do look back, sure there is a waste, an absolute "void", but they are ready for the world...whatever it hands them. How much worse can it get if a child grows up with parents who just don't have any love and support for the child. Not all people can "pull themselves out". It is sad, looking back, and it must seem like a lot of people who were loved as a child are "remote". A child should always be given attention, love, guidance and when the love (guidance) is not there then sometimes that child, in some way, is all the more stronger for the way they were treated as a child. Hard to say what parents think, did they have the ADD? Who could ignore a child's interests and not give him support, guidance, love? These are parents? Do most of them know what they are doing, or are they just acting like the way their parents' treated them. Yes, probably born in the 40's or beforehand, the parents didn't know what to do, so it was "a chain reaction" as to the way their parents treated them. But today, I think parents know very well what they are doing, and I wonder if they get tired themselves, are they weak people, do they have ADD themselves? Or is it they just just absolutely don't care anymore, and the only person that they care about is themselves. I still believe a feeling of "success and accomplishment" are great things to have plus a feeling of strength (mental and physical); I can only hope that the unloved, neglected child thinks of those things when he or she looks back on his or her childhood. He or she became a success on their own, no encouragement/guidance from parents; that to me, is a great accomplishment. Yes, the parents are missing, but to overcome this ...what one needs and has to help them overcome, to me, is great.
ReplyDeleteI know this feeling (waste) that the adult experiences (due to the lack of love from his or her parents in their childhood,) must feel like a "waste" though. It is truly a great sorrow....the damage.
Thanks for sharing what your feeling process is like now after all these years. I won't struggle against my feelings when I'm an elderly lady, now that I have this knowledge. Ps. You seem to have more energy than me at half your age. Katherina
ReplyDeleteDo you play piano? And what kind of music do you like?
ReplyDeleteI traveled with a band when I was in the commandos getting ready for the D-day crossing over the English Channel, which I missed to go back to the South Pacific. Art
DeleteAn email comment:
ReplyDelete"How sad. How true.
I am not as advanced as you and now because of a song I began to thread together many early feelings. The song had the phrase in it "Say something, I'm giving up on you."
We cry out all our lives unknowingly, unheard and unanswered.
This phrase about asking someone to "say something because I am giving up on you" hit me hard and I began to sing it to myself. While I sang it all the feelings in my "primals" came back to me. I was waiting on a kind and loving word from my father who was my last hope for love after my mother had "crushed my heart". It strung together all my religious studies, my incredible loneliness in life, and the time I heard that my dog "Sam" had been put to sleep because of a kidney problem. My dog was given to me by my father, after the first dog also named "Sam" had been shipped to Tennessee because my mother hated "dirty disgusting male dogs". That dog somehow had eaten poison, or so they suspected, and against my Uncle Eddie's offering to take the dog to a vet, he was left to die with my cousin "little Ed" crying beside him.
This one phrase took me through the realization that all my life had been a struggle for my dad to love me and "say something". All the religious struggles, and back to losing my third dog Sam at the age of twelve whose companionship on long walks (this dog was kept outside again at my mother's urging) made him my "only friend". He didn't come with us on the move from one home across state to another, and I wasn't told until we had moved what had happened. I broke down in tears at school thinking of him and was shoved at a very neurotic "counselor" whose fake remonstrations of love I rebuffed. This led to her long trailing me when I convinced my parents how much I didn't want to "see her".
My rebelliousness against her efforts and my parents coldness and cowardliness in accepting me as the "broken flawed one" helped to get me even more bizarre religious psychiatric abuses. Finally I survived them and still defiant for which I am proud. You Art were then later my only light in all that darkness. Yet I digress. The feeling from that song and its phrase "Say something I'm giving up on you." I sang. I sang it to my dad in my mind. I felt the crushing loss of my "only friend" Sam. I saw my own failings toward my own son and I sobbed again as in a past "primal": "I got nobody, I got nobody." The incredible stark crushing hopelessness was there and I could only chip away at it. The full impact of a crushing heart ache from my mother's hatefulness toward myself and toward my "male dogs" still just too horrible to relive except in a minor piece.
"
Part 2:
ReplyDelete"So yes, adding all of this to failing as a parent, having lost all real opportunities in life, and seeing myself distance myself from my friend's god son who only wanted me to play some online video game recently, and recalling his loss of his uninvolved philandering father and his sweet innocent face, all of this still waiting to make it's fullest impact. I will try to see my son more, talk to him more on the phone, and play an online game with my friend's godson (which I told the kid I was too stupid to do), all of this I will try to do and probably fight back tears sometimes. Oddly, my mother had said to me a as small child while she slapped the back of my head to get me to "work harder" scrubbing walls "You stupid little idiot. Stop being lazy." She would stop when my arms hurt because I was scrubbing so hard. "That's better." She would smile and say.
What can we do? When I hear my son my daughter or my friend's god son who is just a child of 12 ask me in any way "to say something so they won't 'give up on me'" I am going to try... and later when alone tumble into the disaster that was my life.
It's not enough just to give to UNICEF now an then, I have to do more, and hopefully that will dull the pain until the next time I have the luxury to feel and find some unlearning of love's hopelessness. When I was crying about all of this I spoke to you Art and to France. What you have done for me and others I hope will give you at least the bittersweet joy that sometimes life seems all about, but I hope you see the humor in all of this as well, for if I were you guys my first response to having someone talk to me as I did to you in my "private healing" would be "oh god why me?" ha "Unseriousing life" has it's value too dear friends, as I am sure you know.
I do apologize deeply for such a long letter, but I am confident you have "skimming power" ;)
Hey before I shelve my heart again out of politeness, I just want to say, "Your sufferings and efforts to help are priceless and I love you both."
Another email:
ReplyDelete"Wow! Art: What a great revelation about your life ... so clear and I hope for many to show what Primal Therapy REALLY means and what it can accomplish.
The shear devastation of that ultimate resignation "what a waste".
You sure are my hero Art.
I would love to wish that your writings are valuable to most, least-ways many. For the average neurotic I fear not. Let's hope I am wrong. This I do know ... you will be leaving a fantastic legacy.
"
Another email:
ReplyDelete"Dear Art,
Such a touching and beautiful post, and so poignant for those of us receptive to the meaning.
With thanks and affection,"
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI found this insight in an old note book from about 18 months ago on the subject of politics, politicians and the stage set for the sympath / parasympath divide:
-"The stratification of the human psyche is reflected in human class systems. Primal adds a definitive sense of 'proportion' to what was once a coveted secret of the elite"-:
GROUPS & their dubious ethics:
Social shame 3rd line
Family guilt 2nd line
Unmet need 1st line.
This generic model shows how compound trauma occurs where 1st line imprints rising up meet 3rd line pressure to conform pushing down. Compression occurs generating narcissistic wounding in the 2nd line.
The psychos understand the status quo and learn to "act as if" they have authority. But through their positioning & maneuvering they fail to accomplish their responsibilities, even when they are skilled enough to perform tasks. Their focus of attention is in getting what they want THROUGH performing tasks, NOT by committing to the PURPOSE of the task (which would requires conscience). So, by using their involvement in the task they get what they want. The medium of employment and money offers this opportunity to nearly everyone and therefore can reduce anyone to unconscious acts in the name of money.
So, the psychos hijack other peoples efforts (tasks) and accomplishments for their own agenda.
They never let on. They use the lower people to implement revenge, they hook our desire for acknowledgement and validation, our need to belong and so we get exploited.
They don't know our pain but they do know how much pain affects us.
The intellectuals get sucked into this way of accomplishing tasks and 'accounting' because they also are largely disconnected from their feelings. The liberal intellectualisation of the middle classes has opened up the breadth and scope of this 'compression zone'. There is a false melting pot of ideas that validate mass repression and it's correlating act outs, all inside the same class boundary.
With psychos at the top and a predominantly intellectualised middle class bureaucracy just underneath to protect them from the people they exploit (mostly now 'abroad' in developing countries). The religious / belief 'wing' of the status quo are also predominantly the intellectual or intellectualised and they offer the faithful yet more moral validation for suffering.
Basically the intellectuals keep on siding with the psychos because they also have compromised connections with their feelings. Some of them (usually after the criminal events) say that they were just following orders and doing their jobs. . .
The intellectuals stand around the 'hot spot' of opinion, around the rim of the pool of others pain looking in whilst the psychos hook the sufferers out to 'SHOW' them to the masses; to create an 'example' to those others who have yet to fall in. Perhaps these are the 'floating voters'. . . Waiting vainly to become more enfranchised.
I'm not waiting.
Paul G.
Art, maybe it is just an unfinished feeling.... maybe you are just not done with something. it is very hard to read... i think it is something strong below it. something you are approaching lately. and you hopelessly will come to it.
ReplyDeleteVuko, you want to be my analyst? I already have two! Take care, art
DeleteAn email comment:
ReplyDelete"What’s a Waste?
Over the past few weeks, my childhood friend and I read aloud to each other from Alice Miller, Hermann Hesse and Georg Klein: We have analyzed and filtered our experiences through our interpretations of Arthur Janov, Ida Rolf and not least our own lifelong experiences of pain / success and sweet lies / clairvoyance. The decisive driving force in the choice of our activities has been: more than 60 years of mutual sympathy for each other (though sadly repressed for >50 years), my epilepsy and my / our understanding of Arthur Janovs "Primal Principle" that is, evolution’s systematic encapsulation / repression of all premature and unbearable pain, both physical and mental.
This morning when we woke up there was Art's Reflection "What a Waste" in our mailbox. After reading it a few times, so we agreed with Art about: "What a Waste"! However, it was not many minutes before I was filled with swirling thoughts / feelings of >70 years, which admittedly sympathized with Art, but which did not agree with him.
Dr. Janovs definition of "waste" felt too one-dimensional, transparent, and without wanting to see the world, evolution as it is. The evolutionary benefits / implications of Arts painful, loveless upbringing led, eventually, to The Primal Principal. This in turn has meant that I, and countless others, have been helped to break us out of our prisons of pain and demystify our symptoms, be safe and sound and to see our individual destinies with better lucidity. I have been able to better understand how evolution prioritize the human species' survival and to accept my mortality and mitigation as an individual.
Without experiential insight in The Primal Principle / Evolution in Reverse, I had not as well been able to integrate Alice Miller’s exploration of the Black, poisionous, Pedagogy. Without your collective wisdom and enlightenment I had thus not been able to understand / believe (as many still do not do!) that a criminal monster could emerge from an innocent little baby. Nor had I been able to understand how Imre Kertész, who (according to Georg Klein) also had a horrific childhood, developed a capability because of distorted emotions and repressions, as a teenager to endure death camps at Auschwitz and Buchenwald and eventually give us a ruthless unemotional picture of the holocaust in his Nobel prize-winning book “Fateless".
The flashback which Dr. Janov partly feels like a personal "waste" has for me and many others led to insights that have become comprehensible through our own painful experiences. When I am capable, I feel them, they become multi-dimensional insights and conscious awareness. At first thought might episodes / periods be perceived as "waste". Overall, and viewed from a holistic perspective, they feel like an improvment / creation.
I end with a few verses from Inger Christensen's Requiem "The Butterfly Valley", which I highly recommend as one of the most beautiful creations of the fluctuations in the evolution / life.
Concealed by the perfume of mountains brush,
all blossoming is rooted in decay,
in tangle, shadow, and decomposition,
a labyrintine, wild insanity,
just as the butterfly in flight conceals
the insect body to which it is bound -
we see it as a flower flying up
not as the rank iconoclasm it is -
"
Insights never erase the hurt. They only make sense of it. art
DeleteHello Art!
Delete"Insight never erase the hurt. They only make sense of it".
Let this be a matter of a question!? "Insight never erase the hurt"... no not insight but to experience the physical pain also removes the physical bonding... experience that removes physical attachment to the memory which turns into a cognitive memory of what it means in our memory as the knowledge about ourselves (to know)... an remembering of the experience for what an physical pain is a reminder... like a lesson we have with us life out. That means that we then remember for what a cognitive memory is a reminder about a physical memory... it to be a memory to remember the meaning... an experience for where it belongs in my brain as my now fysical experience is perceived and makes me not to suffer any more but well remembering the pain... remembering the pain is not the same as be suffering.
Primal Therapy is turning the process of suffering ... suffering becomes pain and the pain goes out through the genetic changes that become a cognitive memory of pain?
An obstruction of the free road for what an physical experience in the brain should mean too much to remain in some form of physical barrier. Maybe it's that you say.
I think that the experience of death is a physically bound experience as in its infancy processing a genetic alteration to the advantage against some remnants of what physical barriers would cause!?
Art pleas help to understand?
Your Frank.
Another email comment:
ReplyDelete"I love this blog. Without a doubt, I have felt a miniscule fraction of that which you have felt and pretty much anyone else even with half-decent access. However, I have very definitely felt this feeling at least in part, as it applies to my life. Yes, the memories remain as well as the ad infinitum “what ifs”. Geesus! Thanks for your inimitable description of experiencing this feeling."
As I once told you, I keep a sense of relating to my/our chimp ancestors, some 300 thousand yrs ago, that is by the time we, homo sapiens, as a species were born in a quite peculiar way. That approach which doesn't come out of thin air but pertains to a very solid basis, helps me gain a broader perspective about our common path. And don't get me wrong, It's not a sort of deterrent insight from reality. I have litterally cried so when it came to admitting two and two make four. We litterally keep a deep black secret encoded in our DNA, that our otherwise normal genetic evolution was altered by a historic event. Scholars have studied The babilonian epic account that goes by tha name of Enuma Elish. And they did from a mythologic angle, but I cannot help considering the spectrum of repressed feelings our counciousness was hit by. I believe our inability to love the present as it is is deeply rooted in the detachment we were forced into when we acquired that cognitive brain (prefrontal cortex) we so proudly praise. It was a sudden (therefore painful) jump into the intelect, so much more that it became Darwin's own pain the ass to leave his lost link unsolved. You and Zechariah Sitchin have become the pillars of my comprehension. From my perspective You're not only unwasted but straightly fundamental to a global and healing comprehension of ourselves. With Love. Lars
ReplyDeleteWhat a waste ???? Can you call that a waste, if you look at you, now, and the marvelous person you became ? And how about the million of people you helped ? I'm a French Canadian, and maybe my terms are not good, and I will ask you to read through them. I'm nearly 72 years old, and I happened to read, 1 year ago : LE CORPS SE SOUVIENT, and my life changed. I knew that all the consultations I had in the pass, never helped me, and I used to say, I'm just narrating a story. What you wrote disturb me a lot, because, my children could blame a lot, and so do my daughter. How can I give what I didn't know exist ? I could never trust my husbands (3) who told me that they loved me ? because I never knew what was love ? Now, I act differently, and I give me the right to be loved.
ReplyDeleteWhen I read your post, I asked myself, if I'm looking back will I lost my present, which I try to live differently, and to see a different way ? I do not want to live the rest of my life with regrets on which I do not have any power. The only one I have, now, is to live differently and always try to make my best, with my children. You are right when you write that memories do not disappear, but may I help my souvenir to heel, knowing that if my parents would have known, they would have act differently, just like I would have done with my children.
I want to go to your clinic, because I know that you will help me to go deeper, and it will help me to change my life. Money is missing for now, but I keep this project for soon.
Thank you for sharing your feelings, and I will always have a great respect for what you have all done, starting from the point zero and until where you are now. Either it does not erase your hurts, you must be sure, that without you and your philosophy of treatment, a lot of people would be very suffering.
You saved a big part of the world, beginning by myself. With this writing, I do not act as your analyst, but as I thanking woman.
I honor you.
DeleteOh my God, you made me cry again. Help, I cannot start my day in tears. Art
I understand you fully as I also feel the loss of what my life could have been, but wasn't,(im now 60).I take comfort in knowing how to be with and love my darling grandchildren. thankyou for teaching me so much.
ReplyDeleteI loved music, I loved play guitar, I loved climbing and I loved skateboarding. All is wasted. One day my father came to me and told "wneh you will finish with this stupid music?". My friends from band are quite famous in here now - I have only tears on my cheeks.
ReplyDeleteArt, Beachcoast and Yuko: I want you to know I read all your comments carefully. They made me sad and made me cry. i wondered too if Art´s feeling of waste was a resolving primal or the ineradicable residue of personal pain which is inevitable in a feeling person, which is what primalling makes you. As Art has written, and so have others, the post primal patient can never be what he would have been with a pain-free childhood.
ReplyDeleteFurthermore, the (increasingly inhuman, complex and mechanised) world we all have to live in will never permit the realisation of the potential of even post primal patients. Beachcoast´s post is an important reminder that children need our help. They now have more pressures on them than ever before. Older people will remember that they still had some measure of freedom in their childhoods to play and explore freely and have adventures. With media hysteria over paedophiles, neurotic parents are easily manipulated into monitoring their children 24 hours a day, and it is in the interests of ruthless Telecom companies that mobile phones are now given to almost all children so they can be constantly monitored by anxious parents. Concurrently, educational demands are creating unbearable pressures on children as they are "conditioned" for an ever more complex and technological world, and greedy, ruthless corporations such as CocaCola and Siemens are now allowed, in exchange for supplying educational equipment which is unaffordable due to universal IMF decreed Government "Austerity measures", to decide on the subjects and contents of not just university courses but both primary and secondary schools. Those children are being brainwashed into accepting that mobiles, computers, coca-cola, meat, dairy and God knows what are good and necessary parts of their modern lives, and the idea of education as a joyful period of FREE childhood self exploration and development has been largely replaced by the forced imposition of a regime of corporate brainwashing which has absolutely no basis in a childs real needs.
I can´t see how much feeling and true intelligence can survive these extra pressures which are now imposed on top of the usual parental caused neuroses, and it is for such reasons that I have suggested that Art might consider writing just a short guide on how to raise children without harming them. World authority on natural diet Dr Douglas Graham could perhaps contribute to such a book on diet and other health prerequisites. And a section on real education would be necessary. Gary
Dr. Janov,
ReplyDelete“my parents could not love because they were not given any”
I said it so many times, for many years, in many ways – one only can give what we have.
Many of us did not receive the most important IMPRINT: love, respect and kindness – so how can we give what we don’t have?
What are the consequences? The next generation will be born without being loved, respected and without kindness.
How many generations will it take until there are only sociopaths on this earth?
Sieglinde
Sieglinde, Alas. art
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