October 2, 2017 (NYTimes.com)
Arthur Janov, a California psychotherapist variously called a messiah and a mountebank for his development of primal scream therapy — a treatment he maintained could cure ailments from depression and alcoholism to ulcers, epilepsy and asthma, not to mention bring about world peace — died on Sunday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 93.
The office manager of his organization, the Janov Primal Center in Santa Monica, Calif., confirmed the death.
A clinical psychologist, Dr. Janov conceived primal therapy, as his method is formally known, after an epiphany in the late 1960s. He introduced it to the world with his first book, “The Primal Scream,” published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons in 1970. The book attracted wide attention in newspapers and magazines and made a celebrity of Dr. Janov, who became a ubiquitous presence on the talk-show circuit.
Primal therapy became a touchstone of ’70s culture, especially after it drew a stream of luminary devotees to Dr. Janov’s Los Angeles treatment center, the Primal Institute, among them John Lennon, Yoko Ono, James Earl Jones and the pianist Roger Williams.
“Few treatments have been more dramatic, more highly touted or quicker to catch on than primal therapy,” The Los Angeles Times wrote in 1971.
Mr. Williams, the article continued, had publicly counted Dr. Janov “as one of history’s five greatest men (along with Socrates, Galileo, Freud and Darwin).”
Dr. Janov appeared to concur. Primal therapy, he told an interviewer in 1971, was “the most important discovery of the 20th century.”
The therapy’s premise was simple: All adult neurosis — and with “neurosis” Dr. Janov cast a wide net — stemmed from repressed infant and early-childhood trauma at the hands of one’s parents.
He called this trauma “primal pain,” and it was manifest, he said, in a cornucopia of ills that could include a variety of mood disorders as well as heart disease, high blood pressure, ulcerative colitis, drug addiction and stuttering.
He also listed homosexuality among the ailments that primal therapy could “cure,” and continued to list it long after the American Psychiatric Association declassified it as a psychiatric disorder in 1973.
Dr. Janov maintained that the way to relieve primal pain — and cure its associated ills — was to relive it via primal therapy, which entailed a regressive return to those distressing, now-accessible early memories.
Dr. Arthur Janov BEA 2008 Interview Video by sterlinghousepub
Reporting in 1971 on a visit to the Primal Institute, which Dr. Janov had established three years before, The Boston Globe wrote:
“He has equipped his therapy chambers with an array of nursery props — teddy bears, cribs, playpens, dolls, football helmets, baby rattles, security blankets — all to help adults turn the clock back.”
The primal scream that could result from these sessions (“It sounds,” Dr. Janov told People magazine in 1978, “like what you might hear from a person about to be murdered”) was not the objective of the therapy per se. It was rather, he said, a sonic barometer of its liberating effects.
Such behavior quickly came to be called “having a primal” or “primaling,” and soon a new noun and verb were deposited into the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Primal therapy is not just making people scream,” Dr. Janov wrote on the website of the Janov Primal Center, a treatment, research and therapist-training facility that he established in 1989 and operated with his second wife, the former France Daunic. “It was never ‘screaming’ therapy.”
Primal therapy was in many ways of a piece with its time. The quest for happiness amid postwar suburban anomie had already spawned Dianetics, the metaphysical movement first propounded in 1950 by L. Ron Hubbard, who four years later rebranded it as Scientology.
The ’60s counterculture saw the birth of the human potential movement, with its promises of enlightened personal fulfillment. The ’70s would see the advent of EST, the set of self-improvement seminars established in 1971.
“Janov’s primal therapy is a classic instance of being the right charismatic therapist at the right time — it’s the zeitgeist,” John C. Norcross, distinguished professor of psychology at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, said in a recent telephone interview. “There was also a belief that repressive strictures of society were holding people back. Hence a therapy that was to loosen the repression would somehow cure mental illness. So it fit perfectly.”
However, Dr. Norcross added, “There is no evidence that screaming and catharsis bring long-term emotional relief.”
In the popular press, early reviewers of “The Primal Scream” were intrigued if cautious.
Writing in The Los Angeles Times in 1970, the book critic Robert Kirsch sounded an admonitory note about its “hyperbole” and “evangelic certainty.” That said, he continued:
“Where he deals with theory and practice rather than the effort to convert disciples, Dr. Janov is an impressive writer and thinker. Certainly, it is a work worth reading and considering.”
Psychologists questioned the book’s assertions from the beginning. They cited, among other issues, the unverifiability of its central claim of the existence of primal pain and the lack of independent, controlled studies demonstrating the therapy’s effectiveness.
But the rhapsodic public endorsement of Mr. Lennon, who, with his wife, Ms. Ono, underwent primal therapy with Dr. Janov in 1970, caused “The Primal Scream” to be heard round the world.
Mr. Lennon’s album “John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band,” a post-Beatles recording released in 1970, was by his own account a reflection of that therapy. It included anguished, half-sung, half-screamed songs like “Mother” (“Mother, you had me, but I never had you / I wanted you, you didn’t want me”) and “My Mummy’s Dead.”
In a companion album, “Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band,” Ms. Ono recorded similar anguish.
The Primal Institute was soon receiving 100 calls a day from prospective patients. At its height, it had branches in New York and Paris.
Although primal therapy has not, as Dr. Janov widely predicted, rendered other forms of psychotherapy obsolete, it has managed to outlive the ’70s by a considerable margin.
