Journal of Psychosomatic ~eoearch. “01. 21. pp. 333 - 339. Pergamon Press. 1977. Printed in Great Britain.

TOWARDS A NEW CONSCIOUSNESS

Arthur Janov, MSW Ph.D.,

Director of the Primal Institute,
62ON, Almont Drive, Los Angeles,
California 90069
ABSTRACT
The basis of Primal Therapy treatment is that traumatic events which
happened to us early in our lives do not vanish because they are for-
gotten. Instead, they are stored in the brain and body as painful
encoded memories exerting a constant stress on the system. These
pains usually result from the deprivation of basic needs such as a
proper, natural birth, being held as an infant and child when upset,
being touched and caressed by one's parents, being listened to and
talked to and being allowed to develop at one's own pace.

The encoded needs and the memories of their denial are repressed by
an elaborate system of gates in the brain which seem to keep us un-
aware of our internal suffering. These memories, it is believed,
form the substance of our neuroses. Childhood pains, called Primal
Pains, form an ever expanding force as the child matures ultimately
forcing us to seek measures to quell it such as smoking, drinking and
overeating. The Rating of pain produces a reverberating circuit of
excitation, experienced subjectively as tension. The amount of
underlying excitation can be measured and quantified. The amount of
resolution of underlying Primal Pain is also subject to quantificat-
ion. In this way progress in therapy can be objectified.

There is commensurate growth of consciousness concomitant with the

resolution of Pain leading us to believe that consciousness and un-
consciousness are inextricably related to underlying Pain.

The resolution of neurosis involves the resolution of early childhood

pain, both physical and psychological. The method ihvolves the re-
living of those events in a systematic way which involves one hypo-
thesis that cerebral gates are "opened" in measured amounts to
liberate repressed material.
In my latest book, "Primal Man - The New Consciousness", co-authored
with Dr. Michael Holden, we describe the results of several years re-
search at the Primal Research Laboratory in Los Angeles, California
as well as independent research done on our patients by scientists at
the UCLA Brain Research Institute.

This research sets forth a number of findings: patients in Primal

Therapy have a permanent lowering of their vital si,Ts after eight
months treatment including pulse, blood pressure and core body temp-
erature. It is believed that this finding will have significant im-
portance for sufferers from hypertension and some forms of heart
disease. There has been a significant lowering of the general acti-
vity of the brain, and a permanent shift in the power of that activity
(known as amplitude) to the right cerebral hemisphere.
We believe that these findings together with follow-up research on
the medical status of Primal patients mav indicate a longer life span.
The metabolic rate has been slowed. Corroborative research in South
Africa (as published in Psychotherapeia) also indicates a continued
decrease in metabolic rate.
A host of psychosomatic afflictions including asthma. colitis. ulcers
and migraine-are particularly responsive to the the&y. Rather
than using medication to suppress symptoms, treatment 1s aimed at
resolution of repressed pain which gives rise to them.
333
334 A. Janov

Two films illustrating Primal Therapy were

shown during this presentation.

I am going to give you a general review of primal therapy, working

on the assumption that most of you are unfamiliar with it. There-
fore, I am going to talk in a general way abo>Jtthe theory and its
discovery, and Dr. Holden will then go into the more complex scien-
tific aspects.

We are going to talk briefly becausejewehave discovered that people

who are unfamiliar with primal learn more about it in questions and
answer sessions and with the two films which we will be showing.
Ten years ago I was in standard clinical practice, having trained as
a Freudian in a psychiatric clinic and had been practising insight
therapy for 17 years. One day a young man who was in my group
talked about a man on the London stage doing a vaudeville act, named
Raphael Ortise. His act involved marching up and down the stage in
diapers, drinking milk out of a blttle, yelling "Mama, Mama", and
inviting the audience to join him. The young man in the office said
he was intrigued by the act and I didn't know why, so I encouraged
him to do it himself, not knowing also why. He did it, and that
type of regression, shown on the film, is what I saw. Now I had no
idea what it was or what to even call it but I taped my sessions in
those days and I listened to that tape over and over for months.
Then a few months later I had a cowboy come in, who said something
about his mother. I said "Whv don't you call her". He did and had
the same reaction, on the floor writhing and then getting up and
saying he felt fantastic. Well, I tried it with patients again and
again over the years and from that simple beginning we have developed
a very complex theory to explain it and a valuable clinical psycho-
therapeutic method in order to treat what lies in there. Now our
position is that the pain you saw in that patient Susan lies in all
of us. That's not an hysterical freak, that's just an everyday
girl, with a common variety of neurosis, suddenly opening up to her
pain. Most of our patients have had all kinds of other kinds of
theranv. When I discovered this treatment, I brought back my old
patienis and re-did them, even though they had felt-fine and never
failed to find that pain or to see enormous changes in them. I
know that if you are coming to this cold, it seems very odd that that
kind of pain goes on right now inside your bodies and your brains
continuously night and day, and that given our techniques we could
open you up and out it would come, but it's true. You have to be
willing, and it's a dangerous procedure in untrained hands, but I'll
have more to say about that later.
I'm going to talk now about what that type of reaction as seen in the
film meant. What I found out was that we were born with a giant
need, and the infant is just a blob of need. What we must keep in
mind is that the need is psychophysiologic, that is needs are
 Towards a New Consciousness 335

wholistic tissue states. When needs go unattended, if you are left

to cry it out in the crib for hours, day after day, night after
night, you are going to be in pain. Unattended needs produce pain
and what happens when you're in pain is that, fortunately, there's a
system of gates in the brain. There are repressive mechanisms that
shut off that pain and render you I-aconsciousof the suffering and
unconscious of your need. Then what happens to the repressed pain
is that it remains below the level of conscious awareness and is
experienced as tension. The pain becomes a reverberating circuit in
the brain and remains there for a lifetime. These pains accumulate,
day after day, when you are not being held, being ridiculed, just not
being caressed, not being fed, breast-fed, being humiliated and so
on. At a certain critical level of painload you become effectively
split from yourself, that is you become split off or disconnected
from your feelings. What you do at that point is act out your
feelings in neurotic ways, in phobias, hostility, strange ideas,
smoking or excessive drinking, or you act them in and get psycho-
somatic afflictions.

As long as you've married a mommy who will take care of you, and you
can smoke and drink and work hard, you will make it in life. But
given a peculiar set of circumstances and long illness where you
can't work, death of a loved one , your wife leaves you and so on,
the accumulated ain produces a faulty neurosis and can lead to
psychosis (Fig 17 . What primal therapy does is produce that
hierarchy in reverse. Starting with a neurotic, for example, we
isolate him for three weeks not letting him smoke, drink, have
television on, or talk to his friends, even on the telephone. That
alone in nine cases out of ten will produce pain. Be then comes
into the clinic, and we manage to re-route his defence system by a
frontal assault on it. What happens is he gets enormously tense and
all of his vital signs go up. At that point, his pulse can be 200,
his blood pressure can be 200, his EEG alpha waves can go up 5Oo"/p,
and his temperature can go up two or three degrees. At a certain
critical level we have found a way to use the tension, to drive the
Derson into that childhood feeline: stored and coded in the brain.
ge is then in agony, writhing and-thrashing. The primal that you
saw on the film lasted two hours. which is about average: When he
finishes with the pain, he descends to that total psychophysiological
needed state, "Mama hold me, Be there for me, touch me, Daddy be nice
to me, want me"? and that kind of thing. That is a primal, a total
psychophysiologic reliving of an early childhood stored memory
experience.
The idea is an early experience in your life sets off a limbic
reverberating circuit of pain. There are some experiments by
Melzake and others in which dogs were given a very brief electronic
shock to the limbic system , which set up a reverberating circuit
lasting indefinitely. Furthermore, as they kept on giving these
dogs brief electric shocks, they began to have seizures. This
shows that pains accumulate, and slow accretions can reach a criti-
cal level in which symptoms develop. In the case of dogs, they have
no behavioural response alternatives and therefore begin to have
seizures.

This accumulated reverberating circuit of energy has access down

through a final common pathway in the hypothalamus into the system,
accelerating the heart, increasing the blood pressure, elevating the
temperature, increasing hormone output or inhibiting hormone output.
The energy also has access upward into the cortex producing
derivatives of that pain in the form of irrational or unreal ideas.
For instance, if you are not held and you are trying to get touched,
then you'd become very seductive as an adult, and every time pain
comes up or anxiety, you want to go to bed with somebody.
336
A. Janov

FPgure 1

T’SYCHOS
t
NE$JROSl
. ,
 Towards a New Consciousness 337

We believe that there is a system of gates in the brain which

operate to repress three different systems of consciousness and
pains can be registered on all those levels. What we think happens
is that the pains are gated in sequence. The earliest pains such
as the trauma of birth, not being with one's mother right after birth,
being held too tightly by blankets in the crib in the first few days
of life, having too much noise in the room, too bright lights and so
on, are laid down in the very innermost brain structures down into
the substantia gealtinom and lower brain stem. They are gated by a
neurochemical mechanism that keeps those pains from even second
level or second line consciousness. As we go on in life there are
pains that are encoded and registered on the second line, that is
later childhood pains. These pains are laid down on a medial or
second elaboration of the brain neuro-embryologically. We call
these second line pains, and it's on this level that there is the
affective dimension given to experience. The first line is viseral.
Then we have a third system of gates which have to do with cognition.
Now the importance of all these gates, is that they keep us unaware
of the raging cauldron underneath, and that is why, not only are we
unaware of pain, but will argue about the fact that it doesn't even
exist.
What primal therapy does, in a methodical and systematic manner, is
give you access through the cognitive level down into the affective
and finally, months or years later, all the way down to the first
line. This then dissipates the energy of that pain and ceases to
drive neurosis.

Once a connection is made between lower and higher centres, that

segment of the reverberating circuits of pain has been eliminated
forever. Well, one would wonder then, has this been suggested to
the patient, do we put them in pain, is it a real experience?

Here you see two little bruises that occurred in a girl just after
she had a birth primal in which she relived being picked up harshly
by the doctor by her elbows. Those bruises came out and stayed for
several days and then went away.

Figure 3 shows a 50-year-old woman, who relived being held upside

down harshly by a doctor at birth? and after that you see the finger-
prints and the thumbprint, that kind of thing came out and would re-
appear every time she had that birth primal, which can be dozens and
dozens of times, because the veilance of the pains laid down at birth
are much higher than pains laid down in the nervous system later on,
and we'll see them in our measurements which Dr. Holden will talk
about.
Figure 4 shows a woman of 53 who relived being beaten by her mother
with a riding crop. As she relived where she was beaten, say on
the right side, then the left, what happened was that the bruises
came out. I don't think there's any way to fake those bruises and
they tell us a lot about the reality of the experience.

The newborn infant has an unmistakable cry, which is heard during

birth prima& but afterwards the same patients cannot duplicate that
cry no matter how hard they try. The experiences that happen to us
in childhood and infancy and birth do not go away once they have
occurred. They remain encoded in the nervous system and brain and
are the generating sources for neurosis and psychosis. That's a
very important idea because, unless you deal directly with those
generating sources you will do nothing but palliate neurosis and
psychosomatic afflictions of whatever origin. That there is a very
direct coruiectionbetween pain and symptoms is shown by the patient
338 A. Janov

Eigure3

Bigure4
 Towards a New Consciousness 339

who comes in with a migraine, which would usually last 4 days, have
a primal and it ceases immediately.

Now I should like to say a couple of things about primal therapy.

Primal therapy is a natural process. That is, we take patients in a
very systematic way, using no drugs, no electronic gimmicks, down
literally from the perimeter of his brain, mid-brain, down below, and
that trip can take months or years. If you interfere with that
normal natural sequential process, you are going to exacerbate
neurosis, even though it seems as though you are making a real dent
in it, and even though the patient may think he's making a dent in
it. Therefore, it is our position that any kind of drugs, such as
ISD, marijuana, and so on, which are used to activate limbic circuits,
depress cortical function and therefore let the upflow of pain occur.
Those methods are dangerous. Likewise, any attempt to by-pass what
we call third end second line events and get down into birth right
away because it is dramatic and seems like such a mervellous tech-
nique, is dangerous. The patient is flooded with pain instead of
integrating small pains at a time over many many months.