Arthur Janov

Arthur Janov (born August 21, 1924) is an American psychologist and psychotherapist, and the creator of Primal Therapy.

Janov directs a psychotherapy institute called the Primal Center in Santa Monica, California, U.S.. He is the author of  The Primal Scream, a book which claimed that mental illness could be eliminated by a therapy that consists of repeatedly descending into, feeling, and expressing long-repressed childhood pain. His writings were the inspiration for the names of British pop bands Tears for Fears and Primal Scream. An actual experience of the therapy inspired John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1970 Plastic Ono Band albums.

Life
Born in Los Angeles, Janov received his B.A. and M.S.W. in psychiatric social work from the University of California, Los Angeles and his Ph.D. in psychology from Claremont Graduate School in 1960. Before turning to Primal Therapy, he practiced conventional psychotherapy in his native California. He did an internship at the Hacker Psychiatric Clinic in Beverly Hills, worked for the Veterans’ Administration at Brentwood Neuropsychiatric Hospital and was in private practice from 1952 till 1967. He was also on the staff of the Psychiatric Department at Los Angeles Children’s Hospital where he was involved in developing their psychosomatic unit. .

Position in relation to other psychological theories and therapies
Much of Janov's writing assumes the ideas of others writing on the subject before him. He assumes that we have an unconscious mind, an idea that can be traced back a very long way, but which is now associated very much with the writings of Sigmund Freud. Like Freud, Janov believes in the power of the unconscious to cause illness, in particular, neurosis, or mental pain deriving from past, usually childhood, experience, but attaching inappropriately or exaggeratedly to current situations - Freud's transference. Janov also recognizes that such unconscious forces can become repressed so that we fail to recognize the true origin of our neurotic pain, and he recognizes resistance to the unveiling of such forces, and sublimation into inappropriate patterns of behavior.

Janov differs from Freud and most psychoanalysts in one important matter - he does not believe that merely becoming aware of past experiences, and recognizing their significance intellectually, is effective as a cure for neurotic symptoms - Freud's catharsis. Nor does he emphasize the strengthening of the ego or superego that many psychodynamic therapies promote as a way of coping. For Janov, it is the simple act of feeling the original emotional pain (that was repressed in its original time and space) while immersed in the original emotional response to the original event - that effects insights and significant change over time. It is the continued process of feeling old feelings to completion that is considered 'curative.'

He claims that his professional life changed in a single day in the mid-1960's with the discovery of what he calls 'Primal Pain'. During a therapy session, he heard (as he describes it), “an eerie scream welling up from the depths of a young man who was lying on the floor”. He went on to develop Primal Therapy, in which clients are encouraged to re-live and express the repressed feeling from 'Primal' events, emphasising the importance of addressing and sometimes screaming at (usually parents) as they might have done long ago had they had sufficient understanding. It is this process of being immersed in past memories and expressing real felt emotion that he claims can effect permanent relief. Janovs claims have been challenged and criticized - see Criticism of Primal Therapy or Debunking Primal Therapy site.

Books
see Bibliography above