Vulgarized Freud
HAAG, ERNEST VAN DEN
Vulgarized Freud The Primal Revolution By Arthur Janov Simon & Schuster. 285 pp. $6.95. Reviewed by Ernest van den Haag Psychoanalyst; Lecturer in Psychology and Sociology, New School; author,...
...Janov's book mentions no failures or cases with unfavorable prognoses or contraindications (primal therapy, it appears, is a panacea or religion...
...The similarity between primal therapy and Christian Science impresses me also because it indicates how attempts to deny an unpleasant or complex reality have shifted ground...
...author, "Political Violence & Civil Disobedience" There is no doubt that the practitioners of Christian Science do at times succeed in freeing their patients from the actual or imaginary diseases that ail them...
...I do not know how frequent such successes are, but they certainly occur often enough to keep the practitioners busy and the patients hopeful...
...Thus he claims that Freud "posited an innate neurotic process in all of us" and a "negative unconscious...
...All this may enhance Janov's prestige with his patients...
...what is original distorts what is correct...
...Janov declares, "Primal therapy is the first psychotherapy for the masses . . . [which] eliminates an elitist corps of experts...
...It seems to me that the explanation for these cures lies elsewhere—in the various circumstances, particularly the transference relationships, described by Sigmund Freud...
...Surprisingly, Dr...
...Janov has founded his method on a reinterpretation of Freud et al...
...The patients who cannot be helped by faith, of course, would be better off with a psychoanalyst...
...accordingly, they are cured by reexperiencing the pain...
...This romantic notion, traceable to Pelagius as well as Rousseau, is nothing, if not trendy...
...As for the theory, it holds all neuroses and related disorders to be caused by early pain so great that it had to be repressed...
...Janov asserts, for example, that "the only psychological truth is experienced truth...
...What is correct in it is not original...
...This is not so much wrong as it is a dime-store vulgarization of Freud's theories...
...I'm not sure that it will help them, but it probably won't harm them either...
...Nonetheless, I can find no grounds at all for accepting the explanation offered by the Christian Scientists: the idea that all evils, including diseases, are imaginary, and a result of bad thinking...
...For that matter, if they believe in it, Christian Science might help—except for those who need to see a physician...
...Janov seems no worse than Ron Hubbard and prettier...
...that denies once more the existence of evil (that is, destructive) impulses...
...Since Freud this basic concept has been accepted enough to become a clich6: One must possess a remarkable combination of gall and ignorance to present it as an original correction of psychoanalysis and to appropriate it in order to give one's own "theory" what plausibility it has...
...Echoes of Reich (both Wilhelm and Charles), but perhaps more of Dia-netics and Scientology...
...He may end up as rich: Psychotherapy for the masses certainly pays more than what the "elitist corps of experts" receives...
...The primal therapy developed and here advocated by Arthur Janov strikes me no differently...
...There are undoubtedly occasional successes...
...or id" (actually, they are not coextensive in psychoanalysis) which is "basically destructive...
...Janov attributes a great deal of nonsense to Freud, only to triumphantly refute it as the champion of common sense against the musty old man who practiced in Vienna and not in Southern California, where every theory is "constructive...
...Even the valid ideas, taken from Freud, are presented as though contradicting him...
...Mary Baker Eddy founded a "science" on a reinterpretation of the Bible that rejected the reality of not only evil, but even pain and unpleasantness...
Vol. 55 • December 1972 • No. 25
