Prologue: Why
"Primal Renaissance"?
Mickel Adzema*
We are living in exciting times. Information hams it up before us at
every turn bringing fascination, paralysis, agony, insight, change, renewal,
and inspiration. We wanted our new journal to reflect some of that excitement
and some of that new vision.
The first half of our new journal's title was originally suggested
by Mary Lynn Adzema and was among many that were offered from far-flung
quarters. It was wrought of generally held feelings of both a newness and
excitement in Primal as well as a general flowering and readiness in our
movement to make its voice heard.
The terms primal psychology, in the second half, as opposed
to, say, primal integration or primal therapy, were chosen
to further reflect that sense of coming into maturity or "growing up."
For it is felt that we are—and that our journal should reflect that we
are—more than just about a particular therapy. Rather, we have come to
know that we represent a particular view and re-envisioning of an entire
spectrum of phenomena—vastly more expansive in scope and implication than
just therapy: from child-caring ("rearing") and biology to spirituality
and ecology, from anthropology and the nature of our humanity to philosophy
and metaphysics . . . and that this view is theoretically developed, and
often clinically practiced, by authors as far afield and unrelated—who
rarely, if ever even use the term primal—as Jean Liedloff; Alice
Miller; John Bradshaw; Joseph Chilton Pearce, to some extent; Gay and Kathlyn
Hendricks; and Stanislav Grof—to name just some of the more popular ones.
We have also grown to represent more than just one therapy. Primal
has come to represent a particular view and direction in therapy, growth,
or healing, which at this point is discovered, at least to some extent,
under headings as diverse as Total Feeling Process, holotropic breathwork,
hakomi, organic process therapy, shamanism (sometimes), organismic psychotherapy,
some forms of rebirthing, psycho-emotional release therapy, and even "past-life
therapy" . . . when done correctly. Also, and most importantly, our
findings, taken together, amount to a comprehensive re-interpretation of
the traditional data from a number of fields in psychology as well as an
introduction of new and "inexplicable" data requiring new and more encompassing
interpretations. Thus our movement has carved out a new field of psychology,
as well as it has stimulated a new paradigm, and we felt it was about time
we stood up and said so. "The Journal of Primal Psychology" was thereby
born.
As for the first half of the title, I was not initially sold on the
term primal renaissance. However, months into the consideration
of titles, a particular vision concerning it burned brightly, shining suddenly
into the room of my consciousness. It let me know that, without a doubt,
primal renaissance is what it had to be.
For weeks I had been working on several articles hovering about the
theme of a natural hunter-gatherer consciousness. Called "paleolithic consciousness"
by one contemporary theorist, this consciousness is reputed to have existed
among our hunter-gatherer progenitors and to be apparent among some current
"primal cultures." It is characterized by greater attunement with
body
and Nature, greater relaxation and well-beingness, more loving child-caring,
greater sensory and aesthetic appreciation, more expanded psychic openness,
fuller emotional and relational capacity, and greater "straightness" with
reality in general. I was also focusing on how our civilization came to
lose that primal expansiveness of soul (à la "ejection from
the Garden of Eden"), as a consequence of an increasing mistrust of Nature,
leading to attempts to control Nature, and consequently body as
well, through the domestication of plants and animals—i.e., the "agrarian
revolution" of ten- to thirty-thousand years B.P.
All of a piece it came to me, seemingly out of nowhere, that what
was going on now in our culture was exactly parallel to what had occurred
during the Renaissance of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. At that
time, as you may recall, the Catholic Church's intellectual hegemony was
loosening, which allowed ancient Roman and Greek texts, preserved in the
monasteries, to be released into the collective culture. There, the "new"
viewpoints—our formerly repressed and forgotten heritage—combined and cross-fertilized
with those prevailing then to create the incredible expansion of human
potential and flowering of culture that the word renaissance now
conveys.
It occurred to me, that night, how we become ever more aware once
again, through primal integration and related techniques, of the vast legacy
of feeling, perception, human fulfillment, and spiritual awareness and
viewpoint that is normally left behind both through our current "child-rearing"
as well as through our species's coming into its much-vaunted "civilization"
in its evolutionary history. Yet, through feeling and healing ourselves
and to extents greater or lesser, we retrieve that lost and repressed legacy.
And we are not alone in that retrieval. Indeed it appears that our
age is increasingly characterized, on a global scale, by an unprecedented
multiculturalism wrought of technological advances in telecommunications
and transportation. Consequently, we are pushed to enjoying an increasing
awareness of the legacies of primal cultures, both current and historical,
just as our own religious, scientific, and Western-cultural hegemonies
are collapsing under that same weight of contrary and xenophobia-eroding
information. This collapse is further aided by momentous and far-reaching
occurrences as diverse as our mistaken engagements in third-world countries,
like our misadventure in Vietnam; the technological crisis of credibility
wrought of the global ecological crisis; and the discoveries of the new
physics with its concurrent death-blow to the pretensions of common-sense
materialism.
It became clear to me that just as centuries ago we came out from
under the thumb of a brand of cultural repression that scapegoated and
repressed former cultures, specifically, the Greek and the Roman legacies,
calling them "pagan," we were now coming out from under the thumb of a
cultural repression and consequent scapegoating of even longer duration—one
extending back ten- to thirty-thousand years! Along with this we
were seeing not only the limitations and inadequacies of the Western civilization
and technology which so many had killed for, and for which so many were
sacrificed; we were seeing also the re-integration of long-lost knowledge
and worldview—which formerly had been obscured and hidden beneath such
pejoratives as "primitive," "savage," and "uncivilized."
In Primal we were learning this only too well, as it seemed necessary
to search out the earliest or least "civilized" cultures possible for the
only pertinent tips we could find on sane and healthy child-caring techniques.
But the rest of our culture is catching on too, and in a big way! Shamanistic practices, rites of passage, and rituals are enjoying great
popularity. Workshops on everything from vision quests, fire-walking, and
Amerindian "sweats" to nature treks, drumming, and "sacred arrow" ceremonies
have begun popping up. And currently we are even recognizing our Western
patriarchal culture's evil hand in the extermination of society upon society
of indigenous peoples; we are rewriting the history books on the legacy
of Columbus even as we pass the five-hundredth anniversary of his landing
here.
What's more, in a manner analogous to the cross-fertilization of
ideas that led to the medieval Renaissance, our culture is expanding and
becoming richer through the inclusion of these alternate perspectives. We, in Primal, are uniquely able to sense the potential of this inclusion
as we experience the effects that this kind of appreciation of the feeling,
the affectionate, the intuitive, the natural, the body, and the senses
has had upon our individual lives. Why would we not think that this kind
of cross-fertilization of repressed heritage would lead to a flowering
of our culture in the same way that it has led to a flowering in our lives?
Indeed, many of us do feel that a "primal renaissance" is
occurring on our planet. Furthermore, many of us believe that this occurrence
may be, in truth, the brightest hope on what otherwise can appear, globally,
to be a rather bleak social and cultural horizon. We know that primal people
and our movement have been in the forefront of this renaissance—germinal
as it may appear at this time and unrecognized as we have been concerning
it—and so we feel we deserve to proclaim its emergence in the title of
our journal and to take our places in nurturing this renewal of cultural
views in its pages.
We invite you to share our excitement and our vision and to participate
with us in the enjoyment of the flowering of our culture and our age as
well as ourselves through the enterprise embodied in this new journal. We anticipate that this publication will represent, at the least, our legacy
and inspiration to future generations; but our greater hope is that it
will be, in one small way, an effort in righting the many wrongs of those
who have come before us toward those earlier primal societies, and the
deeply felt ideas, and cultural ways they held dear.
Copyright © 1996 by Michael D. Adzema
* This
editorial prologue was originally published in the premier issue of Primal
Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology, 1(1), pp. 5-7. Copies
of that issue along with the two subsequent issues of Primal Renaissance: The
Journal of Primal Psychology are available--at a cost of $10 each, plus $3 shipping/handling
($1 additional for each additional copy)--by emailing marylynn@primalspirit.com
or calling directly to Mary Lynn
Adzema, Assistant Editor, at 707-869-9008. We forward proceeds of these
sales to The International Primal Association, which sponsored the first three
issues, prior to its going online, under our auspices.
Comments? E-mail me by clicking on: mickel@primalspirit.com
Mickel Adzema
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