Abreaction and Primal

Words, Words, Words!
I'm so sick of words!
I get words all day through
First from him, now from you!
Is that all you blighters can do?
Don't talk of stars burning above
If you are in love--show me!

- From "My Fair Lady" by Alan Lerner & Frederick Loewe

In his writings, Arthur Janov, the famous popularizer of the word "Primal," used another word, "abreaction," and gave it the opposite meaning to its original definition. Janov defines the term "abreaction" as a non-curative feeling expression that is disconnected from its traumatic origins. Over one hundred years prior to this, abreaction had been first defined as the curative expression of connected feelings.

In their book, "Studies in Hysteria," Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud state that by chance observation they began to speculate that specific precipitating events were the cause of "hysteria." This initial speculation led to investigations over a number of years and finally to the following understanding about the expression of affect (feeling):

"For we found, to our great surprise at first, that each individual hysterical symptom immediately and permanently disappeared when we had succeeded in bringing clearly to light the memory of the event by which it was provoked and in arousing its accompanying affect, and when the patient had described that event in the greatest possible detail and had put the affect into words. Recollection without affect almost invariably produces no result. The psychical process which originally took place must be repeated as vividly as possible; it must be brought back to its status nascendi and then given verbal utterance. Where what we are dealing with are phenomena involving stimuli (spasms, neuralgias and hallucinations) these reappear once again with the fullest intensity and then vanish for ever. Failures of function, such as paralyses and anaesthesias, vanish in the same way, though, of course, with out the temporary intensification being discernible."

Freud and Breuer called this aspect of the healing process "abreaction." In the 1994 IPA Newsletter article "A Primal is a Primal is a Primal Abreaction" (featured on the IPA website), Hal Geddes, a primal therapist, defines the term as follows:

"A primal is a form of abreaction. A primal is an experience in which a person revisits and relives a prototypical traumatic event in an engulfing manner that includes the body, the heart, the mind, and perhaps the soul."

This definition of abreaction stays true to the original meaning.

Geddes goes on further to state: "I believe that when a new entity is discovered by someone who gives it a name, then the definition of that entity is whatever the discoverer says it is."

Disconnected feelings are disconnected feelings, but they are not, by their original definition, abreactions.

Words do matter. It is the intent of words to point the way for us to achieve a healing we so desperately yearn for. For a given word to work for us it cannot point to two different things. We in the IPA respectfully continue to use the word "abreaction" in the manner the originators of the term initially intended-as a way to accurately describe the emotional healing of deep traumatic wounds. In so doing we also continue to convey our deep thanks to Arthur Janov for his clear explanation and popularization of many critically important ideas about emotional healing processes.

Words point the Way.
Words take us Away.
Words are not the Way.

Mickey Judkovics has been involved in Primal, Bonding Psychotherapy, NLP, Gestalt, General Semantics, and Body-oriented awareness as a student and as a teacher for over 20 years.

This article appeared in the Spring 2003 IPA Newsletter.