by Bruce Wilson<\/p>\n
Anyone searching online for information about primal therapy may have come across a website purporting to \u201cdebunk<\/a>\u201d the therapy. This is an elaborate site with many pages consisting of arguments drawn from clinical psychology, philosophy of science, and the rules of critical thinking, all aimed to expose primal therapy as a pseudoscientific fraud. (As a science writer, I have nothing against critical thinking, but I do object to its improper use as demonstrated on that website.) \u00a0The author is an insider, an ex-trainee at the Janov Primal Center, so he has a patina of authority that sets him apart from ignorant critics such as Martin Gardner, who wrote a horribly misinformed article in the Skeptical Inquirer called, Primal Therapy: A Persistent New Age Therapy<\/em>. Despite that, the author cites Gardner\u2019s article in his section, \u201carticles exposing primal therapy\u201d along with other misinformed or irrelevant books and articles, many of which have nothing to do with primal therapy. (The author of the website writes anonymously, so I will called him LP to preserve his identity.)<\/p>\n <\/p>\n To those who are sympathetic to primal therapy, that is, those who have gained benefit from it or see the truth in it, it\u2019s clear that something went terribly wrong with LP\u2019s therapy and training. I have no doubt that he became engaged in a dispute with the management at the Janov Center; I saw the same thing happen at the Denver Primal Center: a therapist trainee disagrees with some aspect of the therapy and the fight begins. Eventually, the therapist quits or is fired and goes off to practice on his own, often with severe, public criticism of his former associates. This has happened hundreds of times throughout the history of psychotherapy, with primal therapy being no exception. But in the case of LP, the schism led not just to a difference in philosophy of how to do primal therapy, but a complete rejection of it.<\/p>\n My point of this post is not to question LP\u2019s experience at the Janov Center or the experiences of the other disgruntled people who post their stories on his site\u2014there are two sides to every story and we are only hearing one side from people who didn\u2019t get what they\u2019d hoped for in primal therapy or had a run-in with the therapists. My first aim is to challenge his depiction of primal therapy as a dangerous, useless, and ineffective therapy, without any merit whatsoever to anyone. My secondary aim is to address his accusations of primal as a pseudoscience. I must admit that LP has presented some valid critiques here, but he bases many of them on a philosophy of science that does not neatly fit with psychotherapy, despite the attempts of many clinical psychologists to do so. There are so many other points on his site which don\u2019t hold up under analysis, which I will address on future posts.<\/p>\n Is Primal Therapy Useless? <\/strong><\/p>\n On his site, LP states that most<\/strong> people do not get well with primal therapy. At best, he says, they go on for years attending sessions and spending a fortune with the hopes they\u2019ll improve. At worst, they decline or may even commit suicide. (Admittedly, there have been suicides among primal patients, but suicide alone is not sufficient to judge the value of a therapy, primal or otherwise. There are always other factors to consider.)\u00a0 He posts testimonials from people unhappy with the therapy or with the therapists. He does this despite his own warning not to draw conclusions from testimonials. These stories are presented without verification and with no indication of how representative they are of other patients\u2019 experiences. So what is the point of posting negative testimonials to balance positive testimonials? All it does is show that some people did not get what they expected from the therapy. This is true of all<\/em> psychotherapies, not just primal.<\/p>\n The alleged claims of bad behavior among therapists is not something I can comment on, although I know two people who had bad experiences at the Janov Center. In both cases, there was a major personality clash between them and a therapist which sadly was not resolved. In one case, I am convinced that attention from another therapist would have cleared up the problem. Primal therapy is full of wounded people, and that includes senior therapists. The truth is that a client can trigger feelings in a therapist which the therapist may be not be able to immediately recognize or resolve. This can spiral out of control and before you know it, there is a war between client and therapist. This is one reason why I think the therapy should be done in a center with many therapists so disputes can be resolved when they arise.<\/p>\n I saw a similar situation at the Denver Center; many people reported tremendous benefit from primal therapy, others struggled along for years without much change, and some got worse, dramatically worse in a few cases. But in most cases (my subjective assessment) those who got worse were disturbed to begin with, some had a history of psychosis or severe, constant or early trauma; others were barely functioning. Those who struggled usually had trouble getting access to their deep feelings. (The reasons are still unclear to me but this would make a good research question.) Often, they engaged in disputes with the therapists because they were not getting what they expected from the therapy and often blamed the therapists, justly or unjustly. In LP’s case, the dispute seems to have escalated into an obsessive project to damage the therapy in the name of “critical thinking.” Because the therapy did not work for him, it cannot work for anyone and if people do report improvement, then they must be delusional, or fallen victim to \u201cgroupthink and group confirmity,\u201dor caught up in a belief system ungrounded in reality, etc.<\/p>\n