The Early Primal Model: A Reappraisal
Frederick M Farrar
1. Repressed feelings are not stored as bundles of energy. They are stored as fixed configurations within the body’s structure.
2. An “unfelt feeling” may be a useful figure of speech but when submitted to the exacting requirements of theory it is a contradiction in terms. If a stimulus is unfelt then it is not a feeling but merely a stimulus. Speaking more precisely we can only say that we harbour memories of unfelt stimuli, not unfelt feelings. These stimuli may have been parts of feelings in the process of formation and may thus retain their wish for satisfactory completion. Recollection of such stimuli will tend to awaken their inherent wish for completion which may take over control of the whole system in furtherance of that wish. Until the interrupted process is transcended and overcome as a prototypic memory, then all current stimuli which recollect it will tend to be incorporated into its strategy of attaining satisfaction.
3. It is important to be clear about the nature of reverberating neural circuits, an idea cited by Arthur Janov to account for the disruptive power of old primal pain. In Janov’s hypothesis these circuits are said to be disconnected from their proper feeling responses and misconnected instead to neurotic defences. He suggests that through repeated use they have become grooved and as a consequence have become stable structures within the body which continue to route energy through them, continually recreating neurotic symptoms. Primal therapy drains these neurotic circuits, he believes, by forming proper connections to the feeling responses they were originally intended to evoke.
However, the research he cites does not relate specifically to neurotic memories but to memory per se. All memories, the researcher suggests, are reverberating circuits of neural energy, and so in the end the idea tells us nothing we don’t already know, namely that memories powerfully influence present experience. What is perhaps more important to bring out is that the energy reverberating around these circuits is present energy, which is being given to the old circuits by current need. The energy of all memories is the result of amplification of current energy by the information structure of those established memory patterns. The volume of this amplification fluctuates according to the attention paid to the primal memories. This attention varies depending on the significance of the primal memories to current conditions. This is why symptoms come and go rather than remaining constant.
4. Because primal memories are embodied patterns they cannot be released. They are part of the body and will remain until they decay due to old age or death. As long as they remain intact they are capable of generating painful feeling according to the degree of attention focused on them. Thus, we cannot determine the necessity for therapy on the basis that pain is found when it is looked for. The truth is that this will remain just as surely the case after therapy as before.
5. The term “neural grooving” refers to the strengthening of neural connections through repeated use. In terms of ordinary experience it simply refers to the force of habit. The term “regrooving” implies developing a new habit. In the primal context this means breaking the habit of repression and replacing it with the habit of feeling. This aspect of primal therapy is rarely stressed. Fundamentally, primal therapy aims to break the habit of repression and encourage the habit of feeling. Primal therapy is thus a form of training which involves integrating natural and learned processes.
6. The notion of forming the habit of feeling is in itself a dangerous notion. It must be tempered with the clear understanding that growth is creative not habitual. We can clarify this by saying that the new habit we are seeking to establish is that of openness. This means openness to whatever is currently significant, whether that be feeling, sensation, or high-order conceptual strategies.
7. The perpetuation of the entrenched habit of repression is maintained by the force of habit and by the reinforcement of repressive values perceived in our environment. These two - force of habit and environmental reinforcement - constitute a particular expression of the unity which is the organism-environment relationship. They interact and condition each other. The force of habit seeks out an environment which matches its expectation, whilst the matched environment reinforces the habitual pattern. This relationship is altered in the therapeutic environment where the habitual pattern is no longer reinforced and begins to lose its current validity. The individual’s repressive values are no longer validated by the values of her therapeutic friends. The effect upon the individual, of constant contact with this different value system, is what makes the therapeutic environment therapeutic. Letting go of our repressive value system is what allows us to feel, not the cathartic release of frustrated feelings. Once again I am shifting the emphasis away from an automatic anatomical process, to the human qualities of courage, creativity and renewed self-confidence.
8. Disintegrating stimuli are encountered as a normal part of life. We experience them as painful and try to avoid them. At low levels of intensity our avoidance of these stimuli is incorporated seamlessly into our everyday affairs. But if they reach levels of intensity which are life threatening we fall back into a very primitive behaviour pattern called the fight-flight response. This is a comprehensive organismic state involving high blood-pressure, constriction of surface capillaries forcing blood into the muscles of the limbs and jaws, secretion of adrenaline and various hormones, all in readiness for or accompanied by intense bodily and mental exertion. This response is instinctual and reflexive, not volitional in the ordinary sense. It is known as the sympathetic mode of the autonomous nervous system.
9. The aim of the sympathetic mode is to avoid or eliminate an environmental threat. Beyond this mode lies another equally important one, known as the parasympathetic mode. The purpose of this mode is to replenish the body, repair it, and conserve its energy. It opens up and relaxes the vascular system allowing blood-borne nutrients to bathe the body’s cells. It allows blood to the skin surface and is generally more diffuse than the concentrated sympathetic mode.
10. Responses to primal pain usually begin in the sympathetic mode. If the painful stimulus permits a response in this mode then the reponse will tend to remain in that mode. If the pain exhausts the sympathetic mode the organism will be forced to rest but will still remain oriented to the sympathetic mode. If, however, the sympathetic mode provokes an intensification of the pain, then the organism will enter into a positive feedback loop, panic leading to greater pain which leads to greater panic, and so on. Such a response pattern, if left unchecked, would fatally exhaust the system, and so the organism must interrupt the sympathetic mode of response in order to survive. This applies to any human organism of any of any age, not merely to infant or juvenile stages of development. (This is because an unlimited positive feedback loop will, by its very nature, drive any system to its limits and result in incoherence or damage.) The interruption of the sympathetic mode leaves only the parasympathetic mode to deal with the remaining damage and stress.
11. All memories affect later behaviour. The earlier the memories the more general their effects. If you’re stung by a wasp when you’re old enough to know what a wasp is, you may become apprehensive about wasps. If your first experience of the world is being asphyxiated in the birth canal, you will almost definitely go on to feel apprehensive about the whole world. The problem here is not caused by the greater intensity of earlier as opposed to later primal pain, but by the more general influence of the earlier experience in contrast to the more specific influence of the later one. The earlier experience is more pervasive in terms of one’s general attitude towards life.
From this point of view it is not actually necessary to posit repression of primal pain in order to account for the generalisation of its effects. Undifferentiated negativity stemming from early life situations is quite a sufficient condition to account for this. The inability to recognise this for what it is is a condition of the lack of self-other differentiation associated with the immature mind. It is not necessarily a sign of an interrupted feeling process, or what we call repression. The adult ego-consciousness simply does not recognise the infantile experience for what it is. It appears instead as an all-pervasive feeling tone, when really it is the pre-egoic mind anticipating the world in terms of a protoypic early memory.
12. In the previous framework repression and its effects are clearly distinguished from the generalising effects of early experience. Part of the value of re-experiencing early experiences is that it allows us to fully specify and differentiate the experience and thus limit its previously massive extent of generalisation. The value of this is quite distinct from any benefits experienced as a result of cathartic completion of interrupted feelings. To understand this we must attend to our terms once again. The word “re-experience” is the culprit this time. Useful though it may be in everyday speech, it is theoretically misleading. We never actually re-experience anything. All of our experience is always completely new. If we remember something for the thirty-third time then that is the first time we have remembered it for the thirty-third time. We bring to that experience the previous thirty two previous occasions we remembered it, and the whole of our life which unfolded during that period. In other words, when we “re-experience” a primal memory as an adult, we do so through the filter of our adult ego. And it is this ego which, by allowing the previous memory to enter into its experience, is able to apply its adult discrimination to it, to understand its special characteristics, and thus to limit its degree of general significance. This power of the adult ego to incorporate and organise previous experience, even at the pre-egoic level, has been under-emphasised in previous primal theory, principally because of Janov’s avoidance of the Freudian understanding of sublimation.
13. All memories remain unconscious until they are actively remembered. Unconsciousness per se is therefore not a sign of repression. Unpleasant memories evoke unpleasant feelings the more vividly they are remembered. This naturally makes us not want to remember them. The more that environmental stimuli match our painful memories the more we do remember them and seek to avoid those stimuli which are causing us to remember them. This, in itself, is perfectly normal. We call it learning, and we normally conceive of it as an eminently valuable human capacity. We classify current stimuli into the same categories as similar previously experienced stimuli and respond in ways which are specific to the types of category they belong to. If we couldn’t do this we would be unable to learn anything. All of our experience would be eternally new and uninformed by previous experience. Generalisation of experience thus occurs on the basis of the experiential categories which we perceive, and this conditions our emotions. Whereas pain and pleasure are organismic functions, fear and desire are ego functions based on our anticipation of categoreal qualities in the phenomena we perceive. It is evident from this analysis, then, that inappropriate emotions will result from misperception of experiential categories.
To give an example, if we recognise that newness is an experiential category, then it is easy to see how habituation to a continually adverse environment early in life before one has discovered anything beyond that adversity, can cause us to associate newness with adversity. This habitual association would, from then on, mar one’s entire experience of life, as long as it remained part of one’s system of categoreal values. This example involves misperception caused by overgeneralisation on the basis of a too narrow experience of the world. But it is worth stopping to ponder just how many other causes of misperception there might be, apart from overwhelming pain, which might give rise to inappropriate feelings. This is precisely the subject matter of most Eastern religious and philosophical practise which many people today, in the West as well as the East, find so meaningful.
14. If we distinguish generalisation from repression, what then are the problems specific to repression. An incomplete experience is a loss of experience and thus a loss of knowledge, a loss of experiential categories, a loss of specificity. In addition to immaturity, therefore, repression is thus a major cause of overgeneralisation. Repressed experience is not experience at all. It is a blind spot in one’s life. It makes us blind to both pain and pleasure, and blind to safety and danger. If the repression involves interrupting the feeling functions then the generalising function sees to it that repression is repeated throughout life in the same categories of experience. Our blindness and insensitivity to experience thus allow us to blunder into one disaster after another whilst at the same time perpetuating the displacement symptoms of diffuse tension and psychosomatic illness involved in the original repression, as well as creating a wealth of new symptoms as an expression of our natural innovativeness. Unlike immaturity, repression is intelligently deliberate, always seeking out the conditions similar to those which originally initiated it.
We may repress our expression of feelings because our parents don’t like it. Though painful this may not be particularly traumatic. We may not realise at first that this is going to make us feel depressed or downcast. After a while we may get fed up and look for some excitement to alleviate the boredom. It may all be very low key, but repressive nonetheless. The full consequences may not come to fruition until many years later when we finally run out of reasons for living. In this case the seeds lay with an unremarkable pattern of emotional subduedness. The real pain appears years later perhaps when one runs out of steam. We may have begun the repression while we were still young and vigorous, not realising that our action would eventually strip our life of its heartfelt qualities.
Alternatively, our repression may have begun out of dire necessity at birth, our system suffering an immediate fatal threat. We may have lost confidence completely and sunk into the energy conserving parasympathetic mode. As a consequence we may have spent our whole lives unaware of our own aggressive power, feeling forever passive and aloof from life, or ashamed by our apparently irredeemable weakness.
15. If we do not appreciate the separate identities of the two problems of repression and generalisation then we are likely to fall into therapeutic errors. An intensely painful memory will, for instance, remain intensely painful even after it has been fully felt. Nothing will ever change that. But we can change our tendency to generalise it throughout our lives. We can do this by authentically specifying it within our experience in order that we might creatively reassess it. We cannot reassess it if we have not first specified it. And we can only specify it by feeling it in the context of our mature ego. From this point of view, Janov is absolutely correct in insisting that the primal patient deals with the least generalising pains, that is, the later ones, first. With regard to resolving pre-egoic or early egoic experience, the more differentiated and specified ego-experience is the better. Having authentically specified prototypic primal pains we can begin, though we are not complelled, to recognise new experiences as belonging to a different set of categories to those involved in those pains. We would, in that case, have broken the habit of anticipating those pains in all of our experience.
Please understand that what I am emphasising here is that generalisation from primal pain is not necessarily dependent upon repression. Therapy may therefore be understood to contain three associated but different functions:
Firstly, it allows interrupted feeling processes to complete themselves in the present. This is not the same as re-experiencing the feeling exactly as one experienced it in the past. Were that the case one would be just as unable to feel it now as one was in the past! The difference is the involvement of a mature, therapeutic ego-environment relationship in the feeling process. One is able to complete the feeling in the present context, because that context conditions the feeling in its completion stage. It breaks any positive feedback loops which may have been operant originally and which would make it impossible to feel no matter what age one were.
Secondly, it authentically specifies the pain or repression within one’s mature ego which clearly distinguishes it from later experience.
And thirdly, it allows the sufferer to enter into a new relationship with the world, the creative values of her therapeutic friends being an essential influence in this adventure.
I am proposing these three processes as therapeutic functions precisely because I do not believe we can assume that any of them happen automatically, either on their own or as a result of one of the others having begun to take place. The crucial element in each case is human courage, initiative, and creativity. We have to actually make choices! Merely feeling our pain does not free us from its generalising effects. In the end we do have to let go of it and put it behind us. We have to break the habit of being a victim. As Vivian Janov once said, we have to pick the ball up and run with it.
16. Arthur Janov seems to see the real self as little more than a system of harmonious, interconnected parts, in which higher systems of consciousness faithfully represent or translate the lower systems of consciousness. Repression of the real self by the unreal self thus means more or less the same thing as saying that the unreal self represses primal pain by repressing feeling. Janov’s ideal real self is one which thinks what it feels and feels what it thinks.
I believe this is a naive view of natural harmony within the self, which forces Janov to reject all those views of past thinkers which recognise the problematic aspect of human nature due to intrinsic conflicts between its component parts. In Janov’s model all systems of consciousness tend to subserve biological criteria. But this is not the same as saying they operate according to biological criteria. In fact human experience suggests this is not the case. Instinctual drives obey instinctual criteria which serve first and foremost the species, not the human individual. Sexuality for instance serves the interest of the species, and apart from being highly pleasurable it is of no individual benefit whatsoever. Similarly, ego-functions obey psychological criteria which are not directly relevant to the instinctual system.
Organic needs are mediated first by the instinctual system. But that system does not merely translate organic needs. It also functions as an autonomous system with its own systemic criteria and parameters. Similarly, the ego system does not merely sublimate instinctual drives; it also functions as a coherent system in its own right. The relative autonomies of these different systems allow dynamic conflicts to occur which we manifest in our behaviour and feelings. Instinctual sexual desire may arise in circumstances which actually pose a threat to the individual. But the individual in the grip of such desire may risk the danger, the outcome being by no means certain. This isn’t a picture of harmony. It is a picture of dynamic inner conflict between competing value-systems.
At each stage of development the centre point of the system changes. Until the ego has gained mass, there are at first just a few ego-functions appended to the instinctual system which still has immediate satisfaction of instincts as its central principle. But later, when the ego-functions acquire a critical mass, the system undergoes a symmetry break and flips to a higher level of organisation. The instincts now become appendages to the ego rather than behaving as a system in their own right. They become subordinated to the ego’s central principle, which is to conserve itself as the ongoing identity which it thinks it is. According to Freud’s theory, eventually the ideal, or super-ego, crystallises out of the general ego and brings about a further symmetry break and an even higher central principle which subordinates both the instincts and the general ego-functions to itself.
At any point developmental obstacles could bring about a reversal of these symmetry breaks so that the whole system would collapse to a lower centre. This is possible because the lower systems continue to cohere sub-consciously, and always retain their potential for dominance within the system as a whole. The higher orders would in this case be engulfed and subsumed by the lower orders, leading to a collapse of ethical and moral values. This is a terrifying prospect for the civilised super-ego for whom it signifies the absorption of loving values into increasingly infantile forms of self-gratification and the craving for immediate satisfaction inherent in those forms. It is interesting in this respect how Janov’s fears differ from those of more traditional thinkers. Whereas for him his great fear is of general confusion brought about by an overload of pain, Freud, who in this respect typifies the traditional view, fears possession by an intelligent and hence malignant bestial consciousness. My own view is in sympathy with the latter and as a consequence I believe Janov does not provide sufficient warning to people of the danger of primal therapy being appended to the central principle of the instinctual system, that is, to the principle of immediate gratification of instinctual wishes. In this context, the expression of primal pain may become an attractive form of immediate satisfaction of instinctual impulses to which the sufferer clings unnecessarily instead of facing the real challenge of living an uncertain creative life.
* * * * * * * 15 August 1997 BACK HOMEPAGE