New Blog on Primal-Oriented Therapy
Peter Prontzos and Bruce Wilson have created a new blog, The Primal Mind, that will focus on the scientific side of Primal. Peter teaches political science, political psychology, and political philosophy at Langara College in Vancouver, B.C. Bruce is a medical writer after a number of years working in a biomedical research lab. Here are some excerpts from their intro and from Bruce's maiden post. .
Neuroscience has come of age and is going in some truly fascinating directions. We now have hybrid "neuro" disciplines such as neurophilosophy, neurotheology, neuro anthtopology, cultural neuroscience, cultural neuropsychology, and neuropsychoanalysis.
The most exciting development is the shift away from cognitive neuroscience towards affective neuroscience. Human and animal emotions are now a rich area of scientific study and, thanks to the work of pioneers like Jaak Panksepp, emotions are now regarded as bona fide experiences, and not just mechanical reactions to stimuli. A rat that squeaks joyously when tickled can now be said to be "laughing" and not "undergoing a positive response to pleasurable stimuli."
The purpose of this blog is to explore recent findings in affective neuroscience and their relation to mental health and psychotherapy in order to create lives with more authenticity and love. The blending of neuroscience with psychotherapy is an emerging area, and although many attempts are being made to link the two disciplines, there is a serious need for the study of deep feeling psychotherapies, such as primal therapy.
In this blog, we will hopefully stimulate a lively dialog among psychologists, psychotherapists, affective neuroscientists, and others who want to see this field advance in a truly scientific way. We believe that these efforts are critical to helping people who are emotionally damaged and need something more powerful than talk therapy. More importantly, we hope to contribute to the creation of a truly compassionate society that will eventually eliminate the need for psychotherapy.
Bruce Wilson writes that he and his friend, Peter Prontzos have been friends for forty years and over that entire period they have been involved in deep feeling therapy (primal therapy) in an attempt to heal their childhood wounds and open to a more fulfilling, integrated, and feeling life. When they met, each was suffering personally and searching for a more authentic, real life in a world that was, and still is, crazy in so many ways.
Both of us are passionately committed to exploring the scientific foundations of deep feeling therapy. Each week, we read the literature on the early life origins of mental illness and find confirmation for what we learned so long ago down on the mat: that early trauma leaves a lifelong imprint on your life.
Although deep feeling work helps many people heal those imprints, it doesn't help others. We'd like to know why. And when it does help, what is happening in the brains and lives of the people who get better? What is the actual mechanism of healing, both in the brain and in our social interactions? Can it all be attributed to the relationship between therapist and client, as some claim, or is there a neurological reconnection process going on between regions of the brain, as Arthur Janov claims.
Check out their blog at The Primal Mind .
|