Learn more about Primal Therapy and our center’s purpose.
Call (310) 392-2003
Basic Theory
The following is taken from Why You Get Sick – How You Get Well by Dr. Arthur Janov and reviews some of the basic theory behind Primal Therapy.
“There is one neurosis, many manifestations and one cure ‘feeling.’”
Repressed pain divides the self in two, and each side wars with the other. One is the real self, loaded with needs and pain that are submerged; the other is the unreal self that attempts to deal with the outside world by trying to fulfill unmet needs with neurotic habits or behaviors such as obsessions or addictions. The split of the self is the essence of neurosis, and neurosis can kill.
That pain is the result of needs and feelings that have gone unfulfilled in early life. Those early unmet needs create what I call Primal Pain. Coming close to death at birth or feeling unloved as a child are examples of such Pain. The Pain goes unfelt at the time because the body is not equipped to experience it fully and deal with it. When the Pain is too much, it is repressed and stored away. When enough unresolved Pain has occurred, we lose access to our feelings and become neurotic.
“The number one killer in the world today is not cancer or heart disease, it is repression.”
Primal Therapy is important in the field of psychology, for it means, ultimately, the end to so much suffering in human beings. Discovering a way to treat Pain means there is a way to stop the misery in which so many of us are mired every day of our lives. After two decades of research, after dealing with thousands of patients with every imaginable psychological and physical affliction, we have arrived at a precise, predictable therapy that reduces the amount of time one spends in treatment and eliminates all the wasted motion. It is a therapy that has been investigated by independent scientists, and the findings are consistent. Primal Therapy is able to reduce or eliminate a host of physical and psychic ailments in a relatively short period of time with lasting results.
“Feeling Pain is the end of suffering.”
We have found ways to measure the ongoing presence and chronic effects of early trauma. We have observed time and again that even though it is not felt, the force of the memory remains in the system, reverberating on lower brain levels and moving against the body wherever it happens to be vulnerable. It shapes our interests, values, motivations and ideas. By reliving these traumas, patients can return back to early events and know with certainty how they formed adult behavior and symptoms.
“Repression is the hidden force behind illness.”
We can see how buried memories constantly activate the system, putting pressure on vital organs and creating disruptions that can eventually result in serious illness. The problem for too many of us is that suddenly we find ourselves with afflictions or obsessions and have no idea how it all happened. We don’t know why we can’t sleep, why we can’t find a mate, why we are obsessed with this idea or that or why we don’t function as we want to sexually. Primal Therapy can clarify these seeming mysteries.
It sometimes seems that everyone is suffering in their own way, and few are aware of it. Television is riddled with ads for ibuprofen, aspirin, sleeping pills and other pain killers, implicitly acknowledging the Pain we are all in but without ever acknowledging it explicitly. Nothing dramatic happens, but so many of us have developed this disease or that, from high blood pressure to allergies, colitis, anxiety attacks, asthma, circulation problems and heart palpitations (our history literally becomes palpable). So many ailments that seem inexplicable—depression and phobias, ulcers and migraines—may all stem from the same source. So might many of our personality quirks, our habits and behavior patterns, our drives and obsessions. One powerful piece of evidence for the fact of the same kinds of Pains being behind so many different afflictions and behavioral problems is that the same kinds of tranquilizers or pain killers are used to treat all of them.
In the fields of medicine and psychotherapy today, doctors deal with symptoms. Just look at the DSM-IV, the psychiatric diagnostic and statistical manual, with page after page of every conceivable variation of neurosis. And in Washington, D.C., they have erected monuments to symptoms, a building for each one “drug abuse, alcoholism, heart disease, cancer and so on. Experts specialize in treating colitis, ulcers, migraines, diabetes, high blood pressure, asthma, anxiety, depression, marital problems, eating disorders, etc., knowing more and more about narrower and narrower subjects. They add salt, take away salt, add thyroid, remove thyroid, speculate about the reasons for one’s allergies or unhappiness, analyze dreams and nearly always prescribe medication. They are trying to normalize the symptom instead of normalizing the person who has it, trying to normalize the manifestation instead of the system that makes it manifest.
Delving deep into the unconscious has allowed us to clarify the basis of adult behavior. We have a good idea of what lies in the unconscious, and it doesn’t seem to be the mystical emporium so often described. We have learned in Primal Therapy that irrespective of whether the Pain is manifest in the body or in the mind, the person is not himself; there is a dislocation of function that is global. Both emotional and physical pain deform cells and cause alterations that show up in measurements of vital signs, brain function and chemistry, the immune system, hormones, peripheral blood flow and in a person’s behavior. Everything is askew.
Primal Therapy works in reverse of the normal approach. Instead of working from symptoms to possible causes, we work from causes to symptoms. The focus is always deep. From this approach, we have developed a more profound understanding of who we are and what drives us, our basic, hidden, unconscious motivations.
Books
Current Books
Beyond Belief
Dr. Arthur Janov examines the power of beliefs and how they are used as a mechanism for dealing with early trauma that goes as far back as birth. Beliefs are a way to rationalize with pain rooted deep in the unconscious, and reveal that love is a biological need. Dr. Janov applies engrossing case studies and his many years of experience to bring the reader one step closer to understanding human behavior, and how pain can become converted into an idea.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Life Before Birth: The Hidden Script That Rules Our Lives
This is Dr. Janov’s opus magnum, a revolutionary work in every sense of the word. It may help to change the practice of psychotherapy as we know it and, above it, how we give birth today—the shoulds and should–nots. It explains in detail how early trauma and adversity can have lifelong consequences and result in serious afflictions from cancer to diabetes. It can have monumental implications for medical practice, as well, and points to how we can rear healthy children.
Events during pregnancy may be as important, if not more important, than genes in determining mental health and disease resistance in adulthood.
Mental illness, heart and respiratory problems, diabetes, Alzheimer’s disease and even the length of our lives may be affected by events in the womb and at birth.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Sex & the Subconscious: Perversions and Diversions in the Realm of the Libido
Here Dr Janov explores how trauma and lack of love stand in the way of millions of people as they try and experience sexual pleasure in life. Replete with case histories addressing a multitude of sexual difficulties, Janov explains how neuroscience and sexual history can combine to create the perfect storm of sexual dysfunction.
There are all kinds of sexual difficulties I address in this book, from impotence and frigidity to compulsive sex rituals (exhibitionism and voyeurism).
Never before have we understood how deep the causes lie of later sexual problems, usually events that long predate sexual maturity. Too often, there is just a problem in getting aroused and seeing sex to the finish. By and large, if sex is diminished so is much of life, as passion underlies sex and life. Or to put it differently, sex is life at its essence. We had better be sexual or our species will die out, not something to be desired. Usually, a load of repression lies beneath sexual indifference. We have found a way to unload that repression in measured steps a bit at a time.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Primal Healing
New Page Book (October 15, 2006)
For the first time, psychology, neurology and physiology are linked to explain the human condition, why love is an important ingredient in determining how the brain and personality develop and how they affect us for a lifetime. He has developed a method for going back in history to the source of unhappiness, depression, anxiety and addiction to undo the damage.
Primal Healing is the culmination of decades of clinical observation and research. Here Dr. Janov melds current research in biology and neurology with his clinical work to produce a definitive thesis regarding how any psychotherapy that uses words as the predominant mode of therapy cannot make a profound change. Dr. Janov traces the route of feeling from the brainstem to the prefrontal cortex, indicating how repression sets in to block our feelings to create a whole host of neurotic behaviors and physical symptoms. He illustrates how effective therapy or “cure” involves unblocking the repressive barrier and allowing lower-level imprinted feelings to rise to the frontal neocortex. All this is explained to the layperson.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Biology of Love
Prometheus Books (March 2000)
Drawing on years of experience with thousands of patients and a growing body of evidence in neurophysiology, human biology and psychology, Dr. Janov shows how love or the lack of it affects not only our sense of psychological well-being but our physical health and our personalities as well.
“Absolutely phenomenal” – David Rubin, Talk Radio Network
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Primal Scream (Revised Edition)
Kessinger Publishing, LLC (September 2007)
An updated edition of the groundbreaking, international bestseller. This is the book that started the worldwide primal movement, changing the face of psychotherapy forever.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Why You Get Sick - How You Get Well
Dove Books (August 1996)
The culmination of over a decade of research and writing, Why You Get Sick – How You Get Well reveals the hidden forces of the unconscious that conspire against the human system, making us sick emotionally and physically. As always with Dr. Janov’s books, there are fascinating case histories.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The New Primal Scream: Primal Therapy 20 Years On
Little, Brown Book Group (January 1, 1991)
A study of the nature and mechanisms of repression featuring new case histories, observations and clinical research. This book includes a thorough explanation of anxiety and panic attacks. To our knowledge, this is the only therapy that goes deep enough into the subconscious to attack anxiety at its source.
Available for Sale on Amazon
La Guérison Primale
Editions Alphee (9 Avril 2009)
Pour la première fois, psychologie, neurologie et physiologie se rejoignent pour expliquer la condition humaine.
Pourquoi l’amour est un element determinant dans le développement du cerveau et de la personnalité, nous affectant pour le reste de notre vie.
La Guérison Primale est l’oeuvre majeure de Dr. Janov, le résultat de dizaines d’années d’observation et de recherches.
Available for Sale on Amazon
El Grito Primal
(2009)
Published for the first time in Spanish. El Grito Primal is translated from the international best-selling book, The Primal Scream.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Out-of-Print Books
Imprints: The Lifelong Effects of the Birth Experience
Putnam Pub Group (T) (November 1984)
Imprints was the result of over 20 years of research on the birth and other early traumas which are engraved into individuals’ physiologic and neurological systems. Such birth imprints can later shape personality and physiology. They can determine how long we will and what inflictions we will suffer later in life.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Prisoners of Pain
Anchor Books (October 1980)
Prisoners of Pain shows how psychological traumas are processed by the brain in the same way as physical injuries and how they can surface as painful diseases in adult life.
Available for Sale on Amazon
Primal Man
Crowell (1975)
Co-authored by Dr. Arthur Janov and Dr. Michael Holden, a neurologist, Primal Man comprises an eloquent statement of Primal theory and a detailed examination of the implications of that theory for everyday life. In addition to probing the neurologic basis of neurosis, the authors explore such diverse subjects as the nature of psychosis, the need for morality, the structure of sleep and dreams, and the emotional and physiological roots of perversion, impotence, and frigidity in sexual life.
This work also sets forth Dr. Janov’s first major exposition of the levels of consciousness, including how they operate and interact.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Feeling Child
Simon & Schuster (January 1975)
In this book Dr. Arthur Janov draws upon his vast experience to suggest ways to bring up an emotionally healthy child, emphasizing the common failures most parents make in not recognizing the real needs of their children. He presents evidence that neurosis may begin well before most people have previously thought – in some cases while the child is still in its mother’s body.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Primal Revolution
Simon & Schuster (1972)
In this book Dr. Arthur Janov explores – through the feelings, actions, and words of his patients – the means through which Primal Therapy solves neurotic problems faster and more effectively than other therapies. Dr. Janov describes how through Primal Therapy a person can quickly gain awareness of her real feelings and her true needs. He also discusses the social implications of neurosis and how neurotic societies produce neurotic individuals.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Anatomy of Mental Illness
G. P. Putnams’s Sons (1971)
The Anatomy of Mental Illness was the successor to The Primal Scream and presents the supporting data and scientific basis of Primal Therapy. Here are extensive follow-ups to case histories of discharged patients who report how they have been freed from psychological problems and physical disorders ranging from colitis and headaches, to addiction and alcohol. It was the first attempt to mesh neurology with Primal Therapy.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Primal Scream
Delta Book (1970)
The book that revolutionized the world of psychotherapy and changed the lives of people everywhere. It was the beginning of three decades of research that produced the most advanced scientific therapy available. The Primal Scream sold more than a million copies and has been translated into twenty-six different languages. A revised edition of The Primal Scream is presently in print.
Available for Sale on Amazon
The Janov Solution: Lifting Depression Through Primal Therapy
SterlingHouse Books (August 1, 2007)
This is a book that indicates that it is almost impossible to eradicate deep depression without plunging into the depths of the unconscious, where the basis of it all lies.
Dr. Janov has found a way to investigate the deep brain system that provides the underpinnings of depression. And further, he has a system to eradicate the pernicious imprinted memories that cause us to feel helpless and hopeless in adult life.
This work also sets forth Dr. Janov’s first major exposition of the levels of consciousness, including how they operate and interact.
Available for Sale on Amazon
How to Get Out-of-Print Books
Try websites that sell used books:
Amazon: www.amazon.com
Barnes & Nobles: http://www.barnesandnoble.com
Powell’s Books: www.powells.com