On my own part, I intuited this ideal as something so palpable that I would never have admitted then that it was no more than an ideal. Perhaps this is because I was so young when I read The Primal Scream and had the luxury of being able to lead a very "natural" lifestyle. I was twenty and seemingly ripe for therapy. The book bowled me over and dropped me straight into my pain. I have worked with that pain ever since, for over twenty years, and have never ceased to be amazed at the effect which feeling it produces. I haven't a shred of doubt that the therapy does what it originally set out to do, and I owe a deeply felt debt of gratitude to all those people, especially Arthur Janov, who discovered and pioneered the therapy. However, no matter how "natural" I became, my intellect has remained precise and sharp.

Deficiencies in Early Primal Theory

I first began to notice this as I followed Arthur Janov's readings of the scientific literature in search for corroboration of the therapy's findings. The basic theoretical explanation of what was happening in the therapy was that neurotic symptoms were caused by repressed primal pain and that that repression was being lifted when patients allowed themselves to feel their pain. As a result, their symptoms subsided to the extent and depth of their feeling. The memories of the occasions giving rise to primal pain were thought of as a "pool" of unfelt feelings which could be emptied by systematically feeling them. The energy associated with repressed painful feelings remained present as diffuse tension and it was this tension which Janov explained in terms of reverberating circuits of neurological energy.

 The reverberating circuits were explained as a result of neurological blocking of painful stimuli, carried out by a normal process of inhibition which the brain uses to protect both itself and the organism as a whole from over stimulation. This blocking defends the organism against potentially fatal levels of exhaustion which would result from responding to overwhelming stimuli. It cannot however isolate the organism from a stimulus once it has occurred and consequently the energy of the stimulus remains, pressurizing the system in a diffuse way, unable to find a proper outlet for expression. Janov, together with E. Michael Holden, argued in their book Primal Man: The New Consciousness, that the only way the reverberating circuits could be released was by connecting them to the memories of which they were originally a part, and allowing them to be responded to in the supportive environment of primal therapy, the idea being that the therapeutic environment, together with the adult constitution of the patient, could allow her to feel what as a child she was incapable of feeling. These connections would complete the primal circuits and release each particular bundle of neural energy accordingly.

What I found difficult to understand in this explanatory model was the idea that a repressed memory could act as a stimulus capable of generating a more or less constant level of tension, an idea which seems to be implicit in the very concept of repressed pain. Presumably something - pain - is there behind the repressive barriers. I could not understand why, if inhibition is a perfectly normal innocuous function of neurons, then the memory could not be simply neutralised and filed away as a bad job. Why does it retain such disruptive power?

A Different Model - Repression and Needs

 This repression of current need is the source of the reverberating circuits, not repression of old primal pain. The consequences of adopting the latter explanatory model in preference to the former are of great importance. It means that what we require from therapy is not to empty one's pool of pain, or release one's reverberating circuits, but to become aware of one's present needs.

Not Release Of Pain, But Knowledge of Need

 Our painful memories will always be there and the more attention we pay to them the more vivid and affective they will be in our lives. This will never change no matter how many times we re-experience them. We will never empty ourselves of primal pain and it saddens me to think how long some of us have been banging our heads against this brick wall.

 I think of E. Michael Holden who now seems to abide in a state of bewilderment, unable to recognise the difference between private experience and public fact, between neurosis and spiritual immaturity. How much of his predicament has come about because of this early theoretical model which encourages the belief that one can ultimately drain the primal circuits by feeling primal pain? (See E. Michael Holden, M.D. -- Spiritual and Primal Experiences)

Descartes and the New Physics

 The process of observation, in other words, involves and thus changes both the observer and the observed which rules out any truly objective knowledge. All of our knowledge belongs to us, not to the object observed. Our perceptual process is self-governing and controls its inputs and outputs. Pain is not externally imposed but is a self-imposed state of responsiveness to a particular range of stimuli. There are no external causes of pain in this sense because pain is a function of our own perceptual system. Stimuli are in themselves neutral.

 This function, being self-governing, always remains within parameters defined by the system. Beyond those parameters there is no pain, only comfort at the lower end of the scale, and damage at the upper end. The area explored by primal therapy is the boundary between feeling and non-feeling at the upper end of the system's parameters. The point I wish to make here is merely that our own organism determines what we may feel and what we may not. We cannot feel the unfeelable.

 When a stimulus affects our system in a way which exceeds our capacity to feel, we simply reach a plateau and stop there. If it goes on to physically damage us, our endorphins cut in and increase the brain's natural inhibitory processes until we are rested enough to continue. In the case of physical damage this process continues rhythmically until our body has either healed or died. The traditional primal contention is that the organism handles emotional pain in much the same way as it handles physical pain, but it adds that the excess of an overwhelming stimulus is stored in the system until it is resolved, or healed. To say this is to go beyond what I have so far described.

Pool of Pain versus Open Wound

 The system of physical pain inhibition is a completely natural process of self-regulation, evolved over millions of years. Similarly, the inhibition of specific emotions is part of the normal system of emotional self-control found in all social animals including mankind. But the repression of responsiveness to one's own needs found in neurosis is chronic and does not originate in any present external stimulus. It is a self-imposed phenomenon instigated by the neurotic as a result of some event or series of events having taken place within one's own organism-environment relationship. What kind of events might bring about such a radical response?

 The obvious answer is: events which persuade one that feeling and expressing one's needs brings no benefit, only frustration and pain. As a consequence the feeling system itself is felt to be the source of the problem rather than one's needs. I am describing something in words which can be understood by the organism intuitively in an instant. It perceives the direction of events within itself and takes appropriate action instinctively. It utilises all of its powers of self-control to mould itself into what its environment demands in the hope that its environment will, as a result, provide it with what it needs. Such events may impress themselves upon the organism either by way of their intensity or their persistence. But the end result is the same in each case: a stabilization of repressive behaviour.

Neural "Grooving" and Reverberating Circuits

 It is true that primal pain overwhelms us at various points in our lives so that we can no longer bear to feel it anymore. It is also true that the feeling of pain is something we are trying to avoid when we express our symptoms. But it is also possible that all of this is something we continue to do out of habit. This is what "neural grooving" means. We are apt to do something because we have grown into the habit of doing it. And in the end that's what has to be changed.

 The purpose of therapy is not to empty out our pool of pain, or even to connect one's symptoms to specific painful memories. It is to replace the habit of repressing responsiveness with the habit of being responsive so that growth based on that responsiveness may take place. Seen from this point of view it becomes very clear that effective therapy cannot dwell exclusively on feeling primal memories as this diminishes general responsiveness by focussing on too narrow a range of experience.

Altering Values Closes Open Primal Wounds

It's not that traditional primal therapy has not done this. But it hasn't theoretically understood the true significance of the therapeutic process, holding instead to an essentially mechanical explanatory model. This is encapsulated very well in Michael Holden's question, "What if our pains are simply so overwhelming as to be unfeelable?" The point is that whatever is unfeelable is not pain. There is no pain outside one's own system. Pain is a particular and useful state of our own system. The question therefore betrays a misunderstanding of the nature of the organism-environment relationship, and in Holden's case has led to dire consequences.

 Overwhelming pain is, by definition, unfeelable, and always will be. It is not an unfelt intensity of pain which we need to feel in order to get well. It is ourselves, our present needs, our present world. When we re-experience the moments of primal pain, when we first cut ourselves off from feeling, we allow ourselves to feel again. But that has happened not because we have felt the unfeelable. It has happened because we have dared to feel again at the moment of disengagement. We have allowed ourselves to see why we cut ourselves off at that moment, and to see the natural wisdom of that decision.

 We are mortal, limited and frail. We cannot feel the unfeelable, nor should we try. To make the attempt would only bring about more damage. Our problem is to overcome our reluctance to continue feeling. Only we are stopping ourselves from doing that. Our primal pain of thirty or forty years ago persuaded us to stop feeling. We must now persuade ourselves to start again. This is a question of courage and renewed faith in our future lives which we may discover by accepting the values of our therapeutic friends and remembering how we turned our backs on those values when we had no such friends but faced our pain alone.

Recapturing the Experience of the Early Split - Then Letting Go

 I now believe that human beings are susceptible to primal pain throughout their lives. I believe that life for human beings is not natural. Quite the opposite: we are extraordinary, unique beings whose characteristic feature is that we predominate as a species by constantly transcending what we have already become. This is the dialectical process which Arthur Janov often refers to. As a consequence of this transcendent, or dialectical nature, every stage of our lives is a potential triumph or catastrophe, with primal pain as an ever-present possibility.

 This is one reason why resonances with past primal pain occur so frequently. It is not always the case that we experience the pain of the past as the present. It is also possible that we experience the pain of the present as the past. Often we cling to past pain because it is the devil that we know rather than the uncertain and unknown future which could genuinely prove to hold fatal possibilities. Indeed, sooner or later, the future most certainly will present us with our own fatality and none of us know how or when. Living with this knowledge is a uniquely human problem, known and understood by every traditional culture on our planet, and yet whose importance is not fully appreciated in Primal Theory.

 A question which troubles me is, if Primal Theory does not acknowledge the intrinsically problematic and frightening nature of human knowledge, does it not isolate primal people from those spiritual forces of humanity which are capable of acknowledging and effectively dealing with it?

Primal Experience Is Real, But Theory Can Lead To Unrealistic Expectations

 As an independent member of society what I want to say to the primal community is, "Look! Stop and listen! Primal theory is a force acting upon people, for better or for worse. Primal theory adds something to the experience of primal pain which is not implicit in that pain. This addition of a theoretical expectation conditions the experiences which we have. If we expect release to result from from feeling primal pain then we will act accordingly. We will interpret therapy in terms of our expectation.

 It either liberates us from primal pain and vindicates our faith in the process, or, it doesn't and makes us feel disappointment and despair in the face of apparently intransigent pain. If we are unable to learn from the latter experience we may hunker down for a long war of attrition and dedicate ourselves to overcoming that intransigence. We may then come to overestimate our pain, believing its significance to be of monumental, mythic proportions. And yet the whole of this proliferation of "primal" experience would have been brought about, not by primal pain, but by an inadequate theoretical understanding leading to unrealistic expectations.

Our pain does not reside in a pool of accumulated memories waiting restlessly to be emptied. Rather, it manifests as an open wound waiting to be closed. Demoralisation and fear of feeling are major obstacles to closing that wound, but it is a mistake to imagine that these factors end with childhood. Human life is uniquely problematic and remains so from the day we are born to the day we die.

 Our perception of our world is imaginatively constructed and as a consequence our emotions are responsive to the products of our imagination. Our imaginations fill up the unknown with limitless possibilities, some good, some bad, some terrifying. Being grounded in our ability to feel ourselves in contact with our environment helps allay our fears, but unless we are prepared to embrace dogmatism this does not remove the problem altogether. Each of us has finite knowledge, but the unknown is limitless, waiting to be filled. Allowing ourselves to remain sensitive and responsive to this uncertainty without craving its opposite, is difficult.

 And in this latter endeavour primal people are not alone. Being responsive is hard work and requires courage and commitment. It's much easier to be lazy. But of course we are now entering the mainstream. We are considering the problems of ethical behaviour, of morality, of philosophical understanding, of self-discipline and training. And surely this is precisely what should happen: primal praxis should interlock with mainstream life. It should lead people into the broad spiritual contemplations which have animated responsive people for millennia.

As soon as we allow ourselves to think like this instead of clinging to an exclusive Primal evangelicalism, then the immense richness of human endeavour opens up to us and we realise we are among friends. This helps. It helps a very great deal because it reinforces our decision to feel again and supports the care extended towards us by our primal friends.

 Human being always has been and always will be an unfinished task. Because of this it is good to have wise friends who can help us avoid the pitfalls which others have made. Human being has produced great wisdom but it is down to us to recognise and accept it. The original primal hypothesis tends to close us off to this possibility by making us think that the true fulfilment of our life lies in being able to empty ourselves of our unfelt pains rather than simply to begin feeling again.

Being Human There Is No Magic Fix

 There is no magic fix. Arthur Janov once said that life is not a problem to be solved but an experience to be lived. He was wrong. The living experience of human life is a problem! Jim Morrison of the Doors summed it up when he said, "No-one gets out of here alive!" Nothing lasts. Everything we try to achieve falls to pieces before our eyes. Despite our love our loved ones succumb to pain, disease and death. This is dukkha. How do we live in the pristine awareness of all that impermanence and failure and still remain unbowed? That is the problem mankind has faced and consciously grappled with for thousands of years. And every single human being has had to deal with it somehow or other, some by turning towards it, some by turning away. We primal people, in choosing to turn towards it, have made ourselves open to the call of all those before us who have made the same choice. I thank my primal friends for this.

Beyond Neural Anatomy

 I have come to believe that we can and must face the reality of these levels of being which we organise into our own sense of humanness. From time to time we may get a glimpse of these aspects of our existence, and if we do it is helpful to know that they are real, not figments of our imagination. Within our experience of ordinary reality lies the extraordinary sheer fact of experience which we usually do not notice. Even the most mundane experience is super mundane in its simple being there.

On occasion we notice this and when we do our world is completely transformed. Our comfy little hidey holes no longer provide any comfort or hiding. No longer can we find peace in laziness or inertia. We are pervaded by a more than ordinary sense of aliveness. We are pervaded by an aliveness which fills the whole universe. Our own being is no different from the being of everything else.

The Universal Oneness

 This is a profound and real experience. It isn't neurotic or psychotic. It isn't a projection of some other meaning, some underlying repression. It is the transcendence of one's own humanness, made possible by our evolutionary nature. We are an organisation of something greater and more extensive than ourselves. Our existence is nothing other than an evolution of that organisation and so fundamentally our being is not a property which we possess. Rather, we are a property possessed by universal being. We are inseparable from it and nothing other than it.

 I suspect Michael Holden discovered this in the throes of primal pain but was not prepared for what he discovered, the result being a compensatory chauvinistic grandiosity in the form of Christian fundamentalism. In fact, the experience does not belong to Christianity alone but is available to us all. It is however a dangerous experience because it cannot be dealt with in any normal egocentric way. Without forewarning we are likely to reject the experience and then discover to our horror that the experience is not rejectable. To reject it would be to reject the very essence of our own being. There would be no difference between the rejector and the rejected.

 And thus as long as we clung to our human naturalness we would be unable to accept this experience. Our only option would then be to repress our sensitivity and responsiveness all over again. This possibility is entirely overlooked in traditional primal theory which conceives of neurosis as a problem of early development but neglects to consider the consequences of disturbances in later development.

 We could learn a great deal from Jungian psychology in this regard. Instead, our denial of even such a possibility is instrumental in ensuring that such transpersonal experience does not arise. However, if such experience is immanent in the human condition, as so many of our species before us have believed, then that denial begins to function as a form of repression which demands to be overcome. In order to achieve this we must go beyond the primal community altogether, for the primal paradigm concerns itself with the natural processes of the human organism, not the transpersonal domains of what is traditionally called the spirit, to which our human minds have access.

Please feel free to respond in writing to:

F. M. Farrar
7 Montacute Rd
Catford
London SE6 4XL
United Kingdom

Fred: I don't agree that you can alleviate the effects of neurosis by becoming aware of your present day needs. I see it strictly as a problem with past repressions. I admit, however, that the past repressions keep us from satisfying present needs.