Ignorance, Denial, and Reality

After 12 years as a Park Avenue Analyst, I began to think I was a failure. Ingenious interpretations, analysis of resistance, transference, my countertransference - all of it didn't significantly change my patients, or me. It wasn't worth all that time and expense. Hence, I embarked upon an eclectic search for several decades and became one of the three founders of the IPA, with William Swartley and Tom Verny.

At the turn of the century, Freud's collaboration with Breuer (Studies in Hysteria) explored cathartic therapy. They found that repressed intense affect had triggered otherwise inexplicable neurotic symptoms - a real breakthrough. Otto Rank later added the repressed trauma of birth. Wilhelm Reich supplied the concept of deep body armoring as a powerful resistance to change. Sandor Ferenczi chided Freud about the interminability of analysis: "Patients need an emotional experience - not re-education."

Here were some of the most significant and unacknowledged sources of Janov's Primal Therapy. In his great haste to credit himself for all these hard-earned discoveries, Janov completely ignored the crucial importance of transference and counter-transference. Thus, he ruthlessly pushed to evoke pain as the royal road to normality. The practice of modesty and humility was certainly not his therapeutic forte. Here, the therapist was "the dealer of pain" - for the good of the patient! It never occurred to Janov and many other therapists that we are all neurotically flawed and need each other's help. This is the real cornerstone of the IPA!

The last two decades provided a powerful tail wind to all therapeutic efforts. Indeed, even without therapy many Americans seemed to be happier during two decades of increased good fortune. With great confidence people and corporations spent and splurged as mountains of debt piled up. We have been more optimistic and confident than ever before. Too confident, as we spent more than we can really afford.

Now we begin to face an epochal zenith from which a huge downturn begins. Unemployment and bankruptcies begin to soar. While the media ponders a "possible double dip Recession," millions of retirees and laid-off workers experience Depression. Since early 2000, the much-heralded "recovery" is an ever-receding mirage. The realization, an uneasy one, is that Enron exemplifies the corrupt enronization of our entire culture.

Silently and gradually, unnoticed, the food and drug oligarchies wreak public havoc for huge profits, with hand picked "regulators" who are deaf, dumb, and blind. Drugs prescribed in hospitals cause more than two million serious reactions (recent U of Toronto study) of which 106,000 die each year - the fourth leading cause of death in the US (JAMA 98; 279[15]:1200-5). This is as many as three times the deaths of 9/11 - per month! But where's the outrage? Meanwhile, my learned colleagues battle to become legalized drug pushers instead of battling the criminal profiteers.

At this late hour, I am concerned that we are busy removing emotional splinters as a vast destructive tsunami approaches. There is little awareness or warning of the huge avalanche of debt and its worldwide derivatives - a Damoclean overhang that threatens financial and social chaos.

I am almost 85. I have an empty medicine cabinet and still play tennis. Having survived The Great Depression, I've earned the rite of doom and gloom. I know the denial of reality can impoverish and even kill you. Don't rely upon Wall St., Madison Ave., or Washington. Use your own head - to save it.

This article appeared in the Fall 2002 IPA Newsletter.