Primal Therapy

[dr.syntax]

Hello, I have been involved in Primal Therapy beginning in the early 1970`s. Because Primal had not been well developed at that time it was not a good time to start. I have struggled along with PT as a patient as best I could. Just recently I have been making some real progress again. So very much new information is now available and I am at a point in my life that I can accept repressed feelings more readily than before. Anyway,this is my first post in this forum and if there are other people interested in Primal Therapy please respond. It is the only solution I am aware of to unresolved troublesome feelings.

[lrd]

If this thread is not closed, I would like to reply and share my experience. From other posts in response to Dr. Syntax it seemed the subject was banned or closed. Is personal experience, not necessarily validated by controlled studies of any value on this forum? I will wait before posting more.

[iNow]

If this thread is not closed, I would like to reply and share my experience. From other posts in response to Dr. Syntax it seemed the subject was banned or closed. Is personal experience, not necessarily validated by controlled studies of any value on this forum? I will wait before posting more.

There is a lot of value in personal experience, yes. However, it is very limited and cannot be used to any great extent. Generally, research and data trump personal anecdote every time. You see this frequently in a court of law, for example, wherein evidence is always given greater weight than eye-witness testimony. To better understand why this is so, all one need do is review the work which is done with optical illusions (showing the flaws in human perceptions). A moderator here named swansont has posted many great links to illusions at the below.

 

http://blogs.scienceforums.net/swansont/archives/category/illusions

 

 

 

 

As for primal therapy, here's some of the aforementioned data.

 

 

The Five Great Myths of Popular Psychology

 

Primal therapy instructs clients to discharge their anger associated with painful emotions experienced in infancy, during birth, and even in utero. To do so, clients must yell, shout obscenities, and kick and hit objects (Singer & Lalich, 1996).

 

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However, a large body of psychological research demonstrates that expressing anger openly is rarely psychologically helpful in the long-run, although it may make people feel slightly better in the short run. Indeed, in most cases, expressing anger actually results in more, not less, long-term anger, raising serious questions concerning the catharsis hypothesis (Lohr, Olatunji, Baumeister, & Bushman, 2006). In a variety of laboratory studies, participants who engage in verbal, written, or physical anger against an aggressor (for example, in a simulated game involving electric shocks) have been found to experience more hostility than participants who did not (Bushman, 2002; Lewis & Bucher, 1992; Warren & Kurlycheck, 1981).

 

 

 

This specific site seems to address concisely most of the faults:

http://debunkingprimaltherapy.com/

 

 

 

And there's more here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primal_therapy

 

Since [the 1970s], primal therapy has fallen into obscurity, in part because Janov never produced the outcomes studies necessary to demonstrate its effectiveness.

 

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Primal therapy has not achieved broad acceptance in mainstream psychology.[19][20] It has been frequently criticized as lacking outcome studies to prove its effectiveness.[21][22][23][24][25][26][27][28] It is regarded as one of the least creditable forms of psychotherapy.[19]

 

Primal therapy has sometimes been criticized as shallow, glib, simplistic, or trendy.[29][30][31][32][33] It has also been criticized for not paying sufficient attention to transference.[34][35] It has also been criticized for its claim that adults can recall infantile experiences, which some researchers believe is impossible.[36] It has also been criticized as being dogmatic or overly reductionist. [30][37]

 

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In 1996, authors Starker and Pankratz published in Psychological reports a study of 300 randomly-sampled psychologists. Participants were asked for their views about the soundness of methods of mental health treatment. Primal therapy was identified as one of the approaches "most in question as to soundness".[20]

 

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Primal therapy is cited in the book The Death of Psychotherapy: From Freud to Alien Abductions. The author claims that all schools of psychotherapy, including primal therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, and others, do not have scientific evidence of effectiveness beyond placebo. [42]

 

In the Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology, Timothy Moore wrote: "Truth be known, primal therapy cannot be defended on scientifically established principles. This is not surprising considering its questionable theoretical rationale." [43]

 

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The National Council Against Health Fraud (NCAHF) Newsletter listed primal therapy, among other treatments, in the article "Dubious Mental Health."[45]

 

 

 

In short, there's a LOT of evidence suggesting it's pretty bunk, even though there may be one or two anecdotes available (such as with yourself) which state otherwise.

[Marat]

The problem with all studies of psychiatric interventions is that it is never entirely clear what the endpoints are or should be which can be taken to indicate 'success,' given that 'being a good, fully-developed human' is an open-ended project with no clear formulae for guidance and no generally agreed-upon, measurable outcome indicative of success. Thus for example, are patients drugged into robotic lack of sensitivity to their own inner states to be labelled as successfully cured of their depression because they don't report feeling the negative emotions of depression any more? Perhaps the medication has only made them insensitive and thus less human, which can hardly be characterized as clincial success.

 

If you become a much deeper but sadder person by reading poetry, studying existential philosophy, or undergoing primal therapy, are you better or worse off? It is not as though we are measuring something as objectively determinable as a treatment for hypertension, hyperglycemia, or hypercalcuria. If imagining that you are re-experiencing a traumatic childhood memory makes you scream and after the process is over your depth of human experience and sense of self-integration seems improved, is the therapy a success or a failure because it can't work the way its theory says it works, given the inaccessibility of those memories? Essentially my point is that we are just using a metaphor borrowed from physiology when we say that the human psyche is 'healthy' or 'diseased,' so we can't very clearly say that any intervention has worked or not.

[Cap'n Refsmmat]

That's a slight misrepresentation of the nature of many psychological studies. They do not evaluate whether a certain treatment "cures" a patient; they define certain criteria to measure (such as long-term anger and anger towards an aggressor, in the studies iNow linked to) and determine whether the therapy alters these criteria. One can then evaluate the claims of a therapy ("by acting out their anger, patients clear their feelings") with the reality ("they just get angrier, really").

 

Deciding what mental state is ideal is something best left to the patient, I should think. That's why informed consent exists.

[Moontanman]

Hmmm... primal therapy, I have a double bladed ax, I am quite attached to it, it's just like the one my grandfather used to chop down trees. I like to split wood, I like to split the wood as fine as possible and as accurately as possible, each stroke brings me pain but it also brings the satisfaction of splitting the wood in an exact manner, balancing the piece of wood is a challenge as well, each stroke becomes easier and harder at the same time in different ways, does this qualify? It does make me feel good in an odd way....

[StringJunky]

Hmmm... primal therapy, I have a double bladed ax, I am quite attached to it, it's just like the one my grandfather used to chop down trees. I like to split wood, I like to split the wood as fine as possible and as accurately as possible, each stroke brings me pain but it also brings the satisfaction of splitting the wood in an exact manner, balancing the piece of wood is a challenge as well, each stroke becomes easier and harder at the same time in different ways, does this qualify? It does make me feel good in an odd way....

 

That sounds like good therapy because this action allows you to initially express the physical element of your distress but the act and goal of splitting it further and more finely with each successive stroke forces you to focus on the job at hand gradually redirecting you from what caused your distressed state in the first place thus causing it to take a backseat in your mind and returning you to a state of calmness.

[Moontanman]

Ahh relaxation (whirls his double bladed ax over head as neighbor calls police....)