Word: primal
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...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...