AN ECLECTIC APPROACH TO PRIMAL INTEGRATION

By Michael Broder

Chapter I

What is the Primal Process?

The primal process begins at birth. For some it may indeed start at conception. When children leave the womb, they leave behind the only place they ever experience total fulfillment of all their basic primal needs.

Since a baby is helpless and dependent, he must now rely on his environment to fulfill his basic primal needs - to be fed, to be kept warm and dry, to grow and develop at his own pace, to be held and caressed, and to be loved, stimulated and validated1. To the extent these needs are satisfied by the parents and others who have contact with him, I believe he will grow to become a loving, pleasure seeking, creative human being capable of reaching his own unique potential . To the extent that these needs are not fulfilled, however, the child will develod an "unreal self."2

This unreal self will produce a split in his personality. The unreal self consists of the traits which he feels will attain the fulfillment of his unmet primal needs. The split takes place simply because it is the only solution that brings the child relief from the pain of feeling that he is not loved for merely being himself. This is primal pain.

Every child experiences primal pain to some extent because a parent cannot possibly always fulfill every need of his quite vulnerable child. The denial of the real self will cause the child to develop any combination of the neuroses, psychoses, character disorders and psychosomatic symptoms when his growth as a human being becomes stifled because he feels his unreal self must take over. In this paper, I shall emphasize how the primal feelings of longing, rage and terror - which I believe underlie all non-organically caused mental disorders - are dealt with therapeutically when the once vulnerable child, now an adult, unable to get what he wants out of life, enters therapy.

This adult must now once.again go through the primal process in order to find the beginning of the path away from his real self. He has now the intellect that he lacked as an infant and child. By re-living and understanding the painful feelings he could once not bear, he can free himself to live in the present and take charge of his life.3

I have found that the primal process has five steps: Commitment, Abreaction, Insiqht, Counter-action and Pro-action. All five steps are repeated many times throughout the therapeutic process. The last three steps are integration steps. Therapy is over when the client can carry out all five steps, particularly the last three, without the help of a therapist. The following is an explanation of the five steps, along with the goals and roles of the client and therapist in each.

A. Commitment

The commitment step of the process, I believe, is the most difficult. When a client enters therapy, he is given both reading material and a personal briefing about what to expect. He is warned that if the process works for him, he will find himself making major changes in his life that may not be anticipated at the time.4

The primal process deals solely with the breakdown of the enormous defenses the child has constructed. Therefore his fantasies of what he should be at the end of therapy may be invalid.

Breaking down a lifetime of defenses will often cause the original pain and vulnerability, perhaps never experienced fully in childhood, to surface again in his daily life - as well as during the therapy sessions. When this happens, it will often make perfect sense to abandon the process because, "This is not for me." In effect, he may not only need to cope with some primal pain but also with the present pain which has brought him into therapy. The therapist's role in aborting this "flight" behavior is to provide a great deal of support. It is essential to keep reassuring the client that he is simply experiencing what he felt before and that it will never be as painful as it was the first time - as a child. The client in this process will only move at his own pace. It is important that the client understands and believes that he, not the therapist, is in charge.

The client will, in some way, go through the commitment period each time he experiences the fright and resistance, a function of exploring yet another unknown area of himself. As therapy progresses, and he gains a great acceptance and working rapport with his defenses, he finds himself unable to deal with the resistance as a positive part of therapy. There are many who cannot deal with this stage. They are referred to other, less intense and less threatening therapuetic interventions. It is not uncommon, however, for such people to return, after they have explored their resistance in other therapies and feel ready to make their commitment.

B. Abreaction

Abreaction is psychoanalytically defined as "the discharge of psychic tension by re-living in words, feelings and actions, a repressed traumatic experience (the original cause of the tension) in the presence of an analyst."5

In primal terms, this means "tracking" the present feelings back to their source. To understand how this takes place, one must first understand the distinction between primal feelings and secondary feelings.

I believe there are only four pure primal feelings: longing, the craving for the fulfillment of unmet needs, such as love; terror, the extreme fear or dread of not being fulfilled; rage, the overwhelming angry passion direct at those who have not fulfilled the child's needs; and joy, the intense feelings of happiness and pleasure. To my knowledge, nobody has ever report observing or going through a primal experience which did not funnel into one or more of these four primal feelings. The infant and small child are almost constantly in a state of feeling one of these primal feelings. To the extent that the infant is allowed to express the negative feelings of longing, terror and rage, he will spontaneously feel the positive feeling of joy. Whenever he is forced to shut off the negative feelings, he will lose contact with the positive ones as well. By losing contact of course, the feelings do not go away. They are pushed into the unconscious, but come out in the form of secondary feelings, which will ultimately determine much of the child's personality as he grows older.

These secondary feelings are all forms and mixtures of the basic four primal feelings. It is, for instance, unusual that someone entering therapy presents as his chief complaint that he is experiencing rage. Instead he willing to speak of the more subtle feelings of guilt or an inability to get along with people. When these secondary feelings of guilt or resentment are experience and traced back to their source, the underlying rage responsible for the secondary feelings will surface, often in proportions that amaze the client. Therefore, secondary feelings have much in common with conscious and pre-conscious feelings in psychoanalytic terms in that they are often very close to, if not a part of, the client's awareness when he begins therapy . However, they only make up the tip of the iceberg. It is the primal feelings which make up the larger part of the iceberg - referred to by Freud as the unconscious.

In order to be freed of the underlying neurosis behind every symptom and secondary negative feeling experienced as an adult without a present day rational cause, the primal patient must do the opposite of the original holding in. He must now allow himself the deep irrational expression of the underlying primal feelings he was once forced to deny. This is the primal way of unburying the unconscious material and bringing it into intellectual and emotional awareness. It is necessary that this be done without the "shoulds", If mights", or "maybes". Again the only important factor to consider is, "What is there buried deeply (unconscious) and now out of intellectual awareness?"6

A full primal is a complete feeling-thought-body experience, accompanied by the acting out of one or more of the four basic primal feelings. The adult self of the client acts as an observing ego serving two functions: first, to provide the self-support necessary to keep going during the experience, and second, to gather the raw data necessary to integrate the experience. The observing ego may vary from alertness to minimal awareness. bordering on psychosis. One invariably comes out of a full primal with a great deal of past and present insight, as well as a tremendous feeling of relief. No two primals are alike for any two people, nor for the same person at different times. They may involve screaming, crying, laughing, silence, words, sounds, any type of physical movements or stillness. Although one usually thinks of the acting out of negative feelings during primals, positive primals are equally important. Experiencing early feelings of love and unadulterated joy help to gain closer touch with the positive parts of our real self - an obvious goal of therapy. They also provide the lifelines necessary to help one go through with some of the deepest most terrifying feelings of primal pain.

Partial or incomplete primals are ones in which deep expression of the primal feelings takes place, but without insight or connection. Often these feelings stem from pre-verbal sources. Likewise, memories and insights often occur without the corresponding affect. Often it is possible to use such unfinished experiences to trigger more complete primals.

The therapist's role during this phase of primal therapy is simply to follow the client's lead and help him to intensify what he is feeling. The therapist then will also help him through the regressive process, if he is having difficulties getting there on his own. At no time does the therapist impose his own ideas, insights, projections or expectation on the client. Primal Integration can only work when the supposition that "nobody knows the client better than the client" is adhered to strictly. For instance, if a client says that he is "feeling nothing", I will probably encourage him to get deeper into feeling nothing. Perhaps I will put a blanket over him and encourage him to be "dead" for a while. The point is, my actions as a therapist, consistently, are to intensify whatever feeling the client is verbalizing or acting out.

Of course, when painful material surfaces, the client is usually in need of support, total acceptance and non-possessive warmth. This support provides him with the reinforcement he needs to continue. Without it, he may close down again, as he did before. Therefore, the procedures of intensification require the therapist to be switching roles constantly, between being the "bad," mean or negative parent figure, usually to intensify terror or rage and being the "good" parent figure to provide support and intensify feeling of longing and joy.

C. Insight

When primal feelings are fully felt and expressed, an integration process must take place in order for the experience to be therapeutically and personally valid and complete. The first phase of this internalization is the actual insight into the abreactive experience and how that experience relates to present day behaviour.

Directly following a primal experience - heretofore referred to as a primal, the client usually chooses to be silent for varying degrees of time until he feels back in the present. During this period of silence, memories, insights and ideas flow freely, as in a meditative state. At some point, I will ask him to share his experience. A client may typically make the following statement: "I saw the bars on the crib. I felt so alone that I could die. called out, but she, mother, couldn't hear me. Then I realized that she wouldn't hear me. I wanted to kill her. When she finally came, I just froze. I was scared she'd leave again. That's why I clutch onto people now and want to so possess them. If I let them out of my grip, I'll lose them." This member of one of my groups made the connection between feeling abandoned as a child by his mother, and his present day possessiveness, which has consistently caused him a great deal of pain in his relationships.

The key words in his statement are, "that's why." They are the key because the provide the bridge between his present day behaviour and the primal source.7 In this particular case, my role was little more than to listen and validate and support his insights. Had he not spontaneously made the connection, I would have asked him how he felt that his primal experiences related to him in the present day. We can often trace this by determining what triggered the primal initially. Sometimes it is helpful to give an objective, non-evaluative, non-judgmental observation of what was seen happening during his primal. For instance, during this primal, the client was at first desperately trying to find something or someone to grasp. We kept taking away objects, such as pillows, and made physical contact with others in the group unavailable in order to help him to intensify his longing. When he finally gave in to this longing and called for his mother, I had an available woman in the group come close to him. That was when he appeared to freeze up and sink into the fear. He finally began to hug the woman and cry very deeply with his whole body. By sharing with the client our observations of his behaviour during the primal without judging or evaluating, we often can help him to put together all of the pieces of what he experienced.

If none of this helps the client to gain insight, we assume that the primal experience is unfinished and the underlying material is not yet ready to surface. Often, the insight will come on the next day, during a dream that week, after the next primal experience, or at any other time. Once the insight has been established and connected, the client is ready to attempt to make his desired changes.

D. Counter-action

Counter-action8 in therapy simply means taking steps to stop unrewarding neurotic behaviour. Often this happens with no conscious effort on the part of the client. For instance, I once had a woman in my group who compulsively bit her nails. She never consciously connected this particular habit with a primal in which she dealt with an enormous feeling of oral agression. Nevertheless, after that primal she stopped biting her nails. The counter-action took place on an unconscious level.

However, sometimes counter-action needs a push. For example, in the case of the man who was acting out early needs by being overly possessive in his present relationships with women, we helped him to recognize the ways in which he was being possessive. It was then up to him to take the risk of consciosuly changing some of his possessive patterns. As he did, he was well on his way.

In primal therapy conscious counter-action often does - as it did in this client's case - bring up more feelings, leading to more primals and other new directions in his personal maturation.

The therapist's role during the counter-action phase is to support and validate the new behaviour of the client's choosing - without which he simply may not change. He will encourage the client to trust his feelings and intuition in respect to finding rewarding relationships and eliminating or dealing with neurotic ones - letting his life flow without using his energy to fuel compulsive behaviour, and to trust his own organism to find happiness within the world in which he lives.

E. Pro-action

The Pro-action phase of the primal process as conceptualized by Hart, et al2 is quite similar to that of the counter-action phase. Here, however, the emphasis is on finding new directions in life, both major and minor. The positive energy discovered as primal integration progresses, enables one to consider possibilities that had formerly been inconceivable. New hobbies, vocations, life styles and relationships now become within a client's reach.

Any change involves risk on some level. When the risks are taken, feelings again are stirred - leading to more primal material.

This is why the primal process never ends. Therapy may end when a patient outgrows a therapist or discovers that he can use the tools he has learned without the help of a therapist. But as long as life endures and feelings continue to flow, the primal sources of feelings will be tapped.

Many people think that primal integration teaches a person to dislike or hate his parents, and to place upon them the blame for all of his problems. Nothing is further from the truth. Primal Integration teaches one to assume complete responsibility for his feelings and to accept his parents for what they are - people. It is only then that he can give up hope on all levels that "Mommy and Daddy will make everything all right". At last he can relate to them as two people who did the best they could, rather than as superhuman forces, powerful enough to shape his entire life - whether or not they are living. He learns to reach out to his peers for the love he needs as an adult. Having genuine positive feelings towards parents is a good sign that the therapy is progressing well. The surest sign, though, is when a client finally says that he is beginning to feel he is now the person he was meant to be.

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1 Janov, The Primal Scream, New York, Dell Publishing Company, 1970
2 ibid., p. 50
3 ibid., p. 392
4 Swartley, Primal Integration, Mays Landing, New Jersey, 1979, p. 7
5 J. P. Chaplin, A Dictionary of Psychology, New York, Dell Publishing Company, 1968, p. 2
6 D. Freudlich, What Is A Primal? , New York, Center for the Whole Person, 1973
7 Janov, op. cit., pp. 239-244
8 Hart, et. al, Going Sane, New York, Jason Aronson, 1975
9 ibid.


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