Primal Revolution in a Void

AFTER THE TIDE of pseudo-psychological half-theories of the late sixties, many critics have refused to take Arthur Janov seriously. But Janov's contribution is unusually promising, for it suggest a combination of psychological theory with theories of social consciousness and of linguistics.

His first volume, The Primal Scream, published three year ago, provoked intense personal reactions, both in those to whose common sense Janov appealed and in those who claimed the book was unmitigated nonsense. Almost all the people I know who have read the book were visibly upset by it. None were psychology majors and, therefore, they were all relatively unaccustomed to "intellectualizing" about psychology. While reading Janov's chapter on "The Nature of Feeling," I discovered I was reliving, in rather vivid detail, several childhood experiences I would have thought I'd entirely forgotten. I am not surprised by those who, as a matter of common sense, immediately accept the complete system of Janov's ideas.

The great usefullness of The Primal Scream, though, stems from the theoretical issues Janov raises. Unfortunately, his critics rarely discuss him on theoretical grounds. Competing psychologists smirk and point out connections between Primal Theory and older theories, most of which Janov acknowledges in The Primal Scream. Some claim that various other therapies can be helpful and hardly address the substance of Janov's work. Some critics strike at Janov's often naive language, undoubtedly a vulnerable point but not an excuse for avoiding the usefulness of his ideas. Janov clearly leaves himself open to such criticism, saying things like, "I had an insight into paranoia the other day while driving," or, more important for his theory, "Well people will logically produce a well society." His apparent simple-mindedness obscures his far more insightful constructions elsewhere. I think Janov's tools should be taken seriously, even if at times, he handles them clumsily.

JANOV'S PICTURE of human psychology appears relatively straight-forward. People are creatures with their species's characteristic needs. "Need" is a "total physiologic state," the physical demand for certain requirements and the mental ramifications of our biological functions. He says:

We are all creatures of need. We are born needing, and the vast majority of us die after a lifetime of struggle with many of our needs unfulfilled. These needs are not excessive--to be fed, kept warm and dry, to grow and develop at our own pace, to be held and caressed, and to be stimulated. These Primal needs are the central reality of the infant.

Needs must be fulfilled if a child is to grow into a healthy adult.

For one reason or another, parents may interfere with their children's expression of their genuine needs. A father, for example, whose parents would never listen to him, may force his children to serve as his constant audience, frustrating their need to speak and to develop intellectually. The children, needing the father's love and depending on him for other kinds of support, confront a choice--talk and incur the father's resentment, or remain silent and preserve the semblance of love.

The need, in this case for self-expression, remains. It not only lies embedded in some psychophysical memory state, but it affects the person's overt behavior and his mental and physical health. The build-up of unexpressed needs produces tension, the human's natural defense against feeling the pain of being unloved for what he is--a person with typical human needs in the particular form in which he expresses them. The neurotic no longer feels his need. His disease is neurosis, the crippling of feeling.

Feeling, like all elements in Janov's picture of human behavior, involves not only mental awareness but the biological processes accompanying or underlying that awareness. Feeling is sensation plus a correct awareness of the origin of that sensation. Our stomachs may tighten if we need to cry. We feel that need if we are aware both of muscles tightening and of the act we need to perform. If a mother tells her son, "Big boys don't cry," for enough years, she may cause his psychophysiological system to block the connection between stomach-tightening and the need to cry out. Whenever his stomach tightens, he attributes it to indigestion. The result is neurotic: when the boy needs to cry, he senses his stomach tightening, but he is unaware of his need. Thus, he no longer feels. He expresses his need, incorrectly, as the need for Alka-Seltzer.

THE CONSEQUENCES of neurosis follow from the nature of the disease. The neurotic stops trying to fulfill his need because he can no longer express it. Not wishing to antagonize an unloving parent, he represses awareness of his need. Instead of behaving according to real needs, he behaves according to contrived and artificial wants which he turns to in order to relieve the pressure of needs. The pursuit of objects transformed into symbols becomes the rationale for his behavior; "symbolic behavior" seeks the release of inner tension.

The form which symbolic behavior assumes depends on several factors including the neurotic's physical constitution, social environment, and economic class. In the case of the child who never was allowed to speak freely, the child might develop natural talents, if he has them, for singing or politics in order to capture the audience response his parents never offered. He may find himself talking compulsively with friends or whining to be the first to answer questions in school. With older people or people who remind him of his father, he may develop an unnaturally soft voice, so that people must constantly tell the neurotic to "speak up."

There is no way to predict causes automatically from symptoms. Only by laying bare the source of his own symbolic behavior can the neurotic work towards escaping his system and act in accordance with his real needs. He is finally freed from the futile struggle for the love of a parent unable to offer love.

PRIMAL THERAPY attempts to uncover the source of symbolic behavior, to determine the source of unresolved tension within each patient. One source of tension may be the kind of parental deprivation I've described; another may be unavoidable deprivation, brought about perhaps by the prolonged illness of a parent. The purpose of the cure is to enable the patient to experience the suppressed pain resulting from his inability to evoke love, the voluntary attempt by another to fulfill his needs. As pain is re-lived the patient feels formerly repressed connections between sensations, the causes of sensations, and the incidents responsible for disconnecting the original sensation and his awareness of need.

The experience of this need is the recognition of love's absence plus the body's crying out for whatever it needed. By mentally pinpointing the psychophysical need and by physically acknowledging it through tears, baby talk, or whatever form of communication is appropriate for the time of childhood deprivation, the patient frees himself from the impules to release tension through symbolic behavior. This is accompanied by physical convulsions as muscles loosen after a lifetime of tension and resistence. The physical reaction--the all-out cry for fulfillment--is the Primal Scream. It is a reconnection of mind and body, and physical changes--in voice pitch, height, breast size, and so on--often accompany the cure and are specifically connected with each patient's neurosis.

Janov makes considerable strides beyond liberal psychotherapy, although sometimes he seems unclear as to the theoretical nature of the advance. In practical terms, he is satisfied by his cures. But his attempts to explain why are often agonizingly circular: I'm right because it works; it works because I'm right. By understanding the nature of Janov's stumbling advance, it is easier to articulate the shortcomings of his theory. Most of these weaknesses appear more explicitly in The Primal Revolution, a new and less formally structured book written to answer questions Janov believes The Primal Scream leaves unanswered. The crucial weakness lies in a distinction Janus fails to make--a distinction between awareness and expression--and from his failure to fully understand the implications of the conclusion that consciousness of real needs depends upon the ability to express them.

FREUDIAN PSYCHOLOGY, as a liberal theory, sees people as creatures with infinite wants. Left to their own devices, divorced from the control of society, they would kill, rape, and steal to satisfy their (primarily sexual) desires. But one day, all these violent people realized that the uninhibited pursuit of their aims would eventually result in devastating war. So, giving up their rights to plunder, they created a society both to protect themselves from their own worst impulses and, in he long-run, to help people--as individuals--to satisfy their desires more safely.

The task of the liberal psychotherapist proceeds logically from this view of people. The therapist must deal with those humans who cannot restrain the characteristic primitive urges of the species. He must reconstruct the individual's defenses, enabling the Freudian neurotic to hold back the tide of violence which lurks behind people's social veneer.

Janov's theory of needs is part of another alternative tradition, maintaining that the indiscriminate attempt to pursue wants stems only from people's inability to fulfill genuine needs.

Marx spoke about this process as it occurs in society. People's consciousness, Marx reasoned, flows directly from their mode of productive activity. They begin with needs, which, at first, are the basic demands for physical survival. Other needs arise directly from the requirements of production, which change as each need is fulfilled in society.

The more people are divorced from self-initiated and self-controlled material production, the less they understand the relation between work as an expression and fulfillment of their real needs and the needs themselves. Work begins to appear as merely an instrument towards artificial ends, like money, and the products of work take on a character hostile to the worker.

I have described Marx's view to reveal what seems to be a clear connection between the process of social alienation he describes and the origins of neurosis as outlined in Janov. Both Janov and Freud suggest, as Freud puts it:

. . .the process of human civilization and the development or educative process of individual human beings . . . are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of objects.

THE DIFFICULTY in Janov's argument arises in his rejection of symbolic behavior for what he calls real behavior. In the return of a person to his self, according to Janov, he begins to behave according to real needs and not according to wants which appear as needs because of neurosis.

But Janov can not reject symbolic behavior in society. Unlike bodily functions, social actions must be interpreted according to a set of shared symbols. For people to reason--to conceive of activity while not in the process of acting--they require a set of symbols whose meanings other people understand. This system is language. Without language, conceiving of anything in the world is impossible, so that our power of conceptualization rests entirely on languages created by society. Alienation, which depends on conceptualization, comes after and not before the formation of symbols. It is in this sense that society creates humanity.

You can not cure society by scrapping symbols; you do not have the opportunity to choose symbols in the first place. A social cure, unlike a psychological therapy, involves creating a system of symbolic analysis through a set of restructured social relations and productive activities, that expresses human needs and facilitates their fulfillment.

THE OTHER GAP in Janov's theory is his understanding of the history of needs. The repressed individual needs rooted in our biological system never change throughout the course of our physical development. My unfulfilled need to be held when I was two would emerge in Primal Therapy precisely as I would have expressed it as an infant, through tears and physical contortions. But social needs change as societies evolve. Each act of production necessitates the act of producing instruments for that production, and so on, so that the fulfillment of each social need creates new social needs. Society is continually creating humankind anew. Reliving the past makes no sense in the sphere of political action.

Primal therapy makes one kind of connection between needs and expression--by calling forth an already ingrained response to needs which arise from within the individual. Social therapy--that is, political action--creates new systems of symbolic analysis through a revolution in social relations, to fulfill real needs people create and define together using concepts that defined and will redefine them.

JANOV, TO improve his theory, must be much more explicit on the nature of needs. Needs which, if unfulfilled can cause neurosis, are communicated to the body by processes within the body. You need no one else to tell you if you have "butterflies in your stomach." But social needs are communicated only by socially created symbols. Therapy provides a return to the self; politics creates a restructuring of systems. The ideal society requires both, but it is foolish to think they are identical processes. Indeed, if a therapy makes the person more individualistic, if it isolates him from other people in social activity, that therapy--no matter how much individual tension it releases--threatens the prospects for social revolution.

I can not evaluate two other kinds of evidence of considerable importance for weighing Janov's final contribution. I am unfamiliar with Janov's "scientific" evidence; his physiological theories and experimental data are contained in The Anatomy of Mental Illness, a book written before The Primal Revolution. I also cannot evaluate Janov's success as a therapist. He has, for example, been calumnized for the current expense involved in Primal Therapy. However, he reportedly hopes to overcome that obstacle as the movement towards his therapy spreads.

It is fitting that Janov wrote his first book in 1970, when the fervor for ill-conceived psychological non-insights was already dying down. Bookshelves may one day be less crowded with self-indulgent speculation on psychology. But whether or not Janov turns out to be a major figure in the field, he is no doubt far down the right track.

Something he should do less is claim the uniqueness of his insights. His theory, as presented, is unique in its structure. But underneath that structure lies a sentiment, which Marx expressed best over 130 years ago. Unfulfilling labor, he wrote, "alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life." When a psychologist develops a theory of real needs, of the relationship between social needs and individual needs, and understands the relationship between changing feeling on a personal level and consciousness on a social level, a revolution may begin to move forward. Whether the revolution will be Primal is not yet clear.