Primal Healing: Access the Incredible Power of Feelings to Improve Your Health

309 Pages·2006·1.43 MB·English

by  Arthur Janov

Table of Contents

Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Acknowledgements
Praise
Introduction
Chapter 1 - IT’S ALL IN YOUR HEAD
Chapter 2 - HOW LOVE SCULPTS THE HEALTHY BRAIN

The Outside Dictates the Inside
Critical Periods: Is It Ever Too Late to Be Loved?
Pain and Repression

Chapter 3 - WHERE IDEAS SPRING FROM: THE DIFFERENT
LANGUAGES OF THE BRAIN

The Three Levels of Consciousness
How Repression Works

Chapter 4 - THE IMPRINT: HOW IT RUNS OUR LIVES

Imprints and Neurophysiology: How Memory Is Inscribed
Imprints Bend Us Physiologically
Talking Therapies: No Match for the Imprint
Reverberations in the Brain
Depression, or the Physiology of Hopelessness

Chapter 5 - THE LEFT AND RIGHT BRAIN: BALANCING THE HUMAN
BEING

Mechanisms That Aid the Disconnection
The Problem With Left-Brain-Centered Psychotherapy
Chapter 6 - COGNITIVE THERAPY: WHY WORDS WON’T DO IT

What Are the Cognitivists Really Doing?
Leaving Biology Behind: Escaping Into the Psychological Wilderness
Helping Patients Get Where They Need to Go
Is There a Place for Cognitive and Other Insight Therapies?

Chapter 7 - THE PROTOTYPE: WHAT MAKES US WHO WE ARE

Parasympaths and Sympaths
The Prototype and Our Physiologic Processes
Fetal Life and Drugs

Chapter 8 - DISCONNECTION AND DISSOCIATION: THE BRAIN’S
GATING SYSTEM AT WORK

The Evolution of Feelings
The Right OBFC: Keeper of Connection to Our History
Dislocation of the Mind
Reconnecting the Brain
How Memory Is Formed
The Limbic System and Its Connections
The Delusion of “Adjustment”
The Tango of the Two Hemispheres
The Road to Mental Health
The Meaning of Integration

Chapter 9 - AWARENESS VERSUS CONSCIOUSNESS

The Evolution of Feelings
The Nature of Addiction
Appearances and Essences
Riding the Vehicle of Feeling
The Patient Has the Power
Drugs Make Neurosis Work

Chapter 10 - WHY WE HAVE TO RELIVE IN ORDER TO GET WELL
The Role of Insights in Psychotherapy
Why We Must Relive as a Total Experience
Recovering Hidden Memory
Self-Destructive Behavior
What Neurosis, and Reliving, Do to the Brain

Chapter 11 - TOWARD A THERAPY OF FEELING: ONE CURE FOR MANY
DISEASES
APPENDIX: - WHAT IS PRIMAL THERAPY?
NOTES
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Copyright © 2007 by Arthur Janov
All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions. This book may not be
reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form or by any means electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter
invented, without written permission from the publisher, The Career Press.

PRIMAL HEALING
TYPESET BY KATE HENCHES
Cover design by Lu Rossman/Digi Dog
Printed in the U.S.A. by Book-mart Press

To order this title, please call toll-free 1-800-CAREER-1 (NJ and Canada: 201-848- 0310) to order using
VISA or MasterCard, or for further information on books from Career Press.

The Career Press, Inc., 3 Tice Road, PO Box 687,
Franklin Lakes, NJ 07417
www.careerpress.com
www.newpagebooks.com

Primal Therapy is dangerous in untrained hands. If you have any questions about those who claim to
be Primal therapists please contact the Primal Center at [email protected].
For information about proper Primal Therapy please see our Website: www.primaltherapy.com.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Janov, Arthur.
Primal healing : access to the incredible power of feelings to improve your health
: a revolutionary new therapy from the creator of Primal Scream / by Arthur Janov.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ).
ISBN-13: 978-1-56414-916-9 ISBN-10: 1-56414-916-1
1. Primal therapy. 2. Emotions—Health aspects. I. Title.

RC489.P67J356 2006
615.5--dc22
2006012349
DEDICATION

Adieu,
Michael, Matt, Mimi, Nanou, Michel, Larry, Helmut, Eddie, Bernie, Jack,
Marion.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I want to thank Dr. Paul Thompson of the UCLA Neuroimaging Center for his
help in my effort. Thank you, too, to Dr. David Goodman of the Newport
Neuroscience Center for his contribution to my statements in neurology; also a
word of thanks to Dr. Jonty Christie. My gratitude to Dr. Mike Makepeace, who
was very helpful in improving the language in this book, as well as to my
research assistant David Lassoff, who spent many hours verifying sometimes
obscure references. Thank you to editor, Kathy Wyer, for her many hours of
editorial help and also to Randy Malat, my editor for many years. Thanks go, as
well, to Drs. Geoffrey Carr and Peter Prontzos for their valuable input. My
thanks, finally, to editor Elizabeth Lyon, who really brought this book together,
spending long hours refining it.
My deepest appreciation to my wife, Dr. France Janov, who read and reread
these chapters offering invaluable insight along the way. As director of clinical
training at our center she has helped develop the theory and techniques of the
Primal approach. Her additions and corrections to what I write are everywhere
throughout this book.
Finally, I want to thank my recently departed long-time colleague, neurologist
Dr. Michael Holden, who nurtured my interest in neurology and taught me so
much.
Design of three levels of consciousness image on page 59 by Dr. France
Janov.
For more it is than I can well express
And that deep torture may be called a hell
When more is felt than one hath power to tell.
The Rape of Lucrece
—Shakespeare

We must pursue the duty of memory to its conclusion.
—Jacques Chirac, President of France

Memory is a duty.
And memory is medicine.
—Dr. Arthur Janov
INTRODUCTION

As a clinical psychologist with more than 50 years in the field, I’ve come to
appreciate that if we are to effectively treat mental health problems, we must
combine the best of both worlds and integrate the discipline of neuroscience with
that of psychology. A deepening exchange is needed, a cross-pollination of
knowledge and practice between these two fields.
In this book I shall try to fuse neurology, psychology, and biology into one
organic whole so that we humans will no longer be dissected into separate parts
for convenience of study. This will allow us to explain human beings in a truly
holistic way, seeing how psychology interacts with neurology to determine our
behavior and our symptoms. Thus, when we make a psychologic diagnosis it
will also encompass other sciences, at the same time making a diagnosis of how
our physical system works along with the emotional one. For example, we shall
not only discuss obsessiveness but also where it occurs in the brain and what the
factors were in history that gave it its start. And sexual impotence—how
neurologic factors affect it, and where in the sufferer’s history experiences
occurred that might have given rise to it later on. In this way, we shall cut across
several disciplines to help us understand who we are, and how emotional factors
affect the brain and body, and vice versa. We are of one piece. We can abstract
different aspects of us for convenience of study, but the fact remains that we are
one organic whole. At some point we have to put all of the pieces back together
to provide holistic, organic answers for the human condition.
Those of us who have been trained extensively and practice Primal Therapy at
the center believe that for the first time we are establishing the first science of
psychotherapy. We videotape all sessions and we go over them. When a mistake
is made we know it immediately because the therapy is precise and ordered. This
was never the case when I practiced psychoanalytic psychotherapy. What this
means is that we now have a systematic therapy that can truly make people
better. I hesitate to use the word “cure” because it has an opprobrious
connotation, but the fact is that in many cases that is exactly what happens. This
is because we are able to probe into the depths of the brain and into the antipodes
of the unconscious to ferret out traumatic elements that have lain there for
decades, hidden and deep, doing all kinds of damage, affecting our behavior and
what kind of ailments we shall suffer. I believe that this book is an avatar for our