NOTE: This is Part Two of "Reunion With the Positive
(Self)." It is a continuation of "Part One: The Other Half of 'The Cure'";
and it will be followed by "Part Three: Fostering the Emergence of One's
'Original Face'" — scheduled for publication in the next
issue of Primal Renaissance: The Journal of Primal
Psychology.
ABSTRACT: The primary and indispensable factor in evoking one’s
positive self is the receiving of unconditional acceptance from
another — whether therapist, lover, friend, avatar . . . or God.
Feeling
unconditionally accepted for all that one is — though not for the acting out of
one’s Pain — one eventually comes to accept oneself and thereby to become
more real: For a crucial aspect of the real self is its unconditional
acceptance of itself. Another word for this unconditional acceptance is love,
real love. Unfortunately, too often in therapy, enabling
substitutes for real love. Facilitators who are not far enough along in
their process can hurt, not help, a client's process. Fear of
confrontation and a neurotic desire to be liked, a cult of
"self-esteem" gone amok, and the all-too-common desire for financial
gain in a field that offers little such reward result in some facilitators
being pleasing rather than taking the risk of being real. The problems of
transference and counter-transference are even more problematic in deep
feeling therapy. A therapist or facilitator has as his or her ultimate responsibility to
be “straight” with their client — that is, to model “realness” to one
who does not know what realness looks like and is in therapy to learn that.
This means the therapist needs to reflect back, honestly and as gently as
possible, what is in the client's best interest, not the therapist's, which is
the difference between loving and enabling. All in all, in spirituality
and in therapy and in general, it is love that is the “technique”; it is love that is the way; it is
love alone that heals; it is love alone that matters.*
Fostering Emergence of the Positive
If we acknowledge that it is important to have
access to one’s positive grids below the negative grids in order to truly go
beyond the tendency to continue triggering ourselves into our Pain, the next
logical question is just how do we foster the access to those positive scenes/
experiences/ matrices/ templates. Thus, an interesting and important aspect of this
emergence of positive scenarios has to do with the way these matrices emerge
and how they can be aided in their emergence.
The first and most
essential aspect of this process has to do with the role of the therapist, or
in a larger context, that of a significant other or Other —
whether lover, friend, avatar,
or God. And crucial to this is an understanding of the relationship between unconditional acceptance and the
therapeutic, spiritual process. Following that, we need to focus on the
related, though separate, role of positive
regard in the therapeutic process — more
generally, in the process of growth or spiritual evolution, and, what I will
want to show eventually, might best be termed, human evolution.
Finally, it is
important to bring out the specific other aspects of fostering the emergence
of the positive: In Part Three of this
series of articles — under the heading of “Fostering the Emergence of One's
‘Original Face’” — I will discuss other means, some less commonly known, for
accessing and reuniting with one’s positive (Self).
I will be laying out specific, proven methods and catalysts of human
evolution. While I
cannot hope to exhaust all the possibilities, I will humbly address what
I know to work, as well as what I have observed and/or experienced to be
counterproductive, even harmful. In discussing what works, it will be
important to elaborate on the use of breath,
as a means of accessing or tapping in to Spirit —
which is practically the
definition of positive scenarios or the real, positive self — along with
some time-honored, as well as growing-edge, powerful practices.
First, however,
let us turn to the crucial role of unconditional acceptance in human evolution
and, especially, experiential psychotherapy.
Unconditional
Acceptance and the Primal Process
The primary and indispensable factor in this
process —
something
that distinguishes Primal and its related experiential therapies from most all
others
—
is unconditional acceptance. And while it is an implied and crucial
aspect of classical primal therapy, to my knowledge it has not really been
focused on in print. Its importance has not been highlighted nor has it been
delineated in its aspects and its applications. Since unconditional
acceptance is so easily
confused with “enabling”-type behavior
—
which is counterproductive and
the opposite of unconditional acceptance or "real love," it needs some attention.
Unconditional Acceptance and the
Real Self
A
prerequisite for growth, within the primal process, is unconditional
acceptance. This means that the client is supported in all that he is, no
matter what that might be. This does not mean that the client is supported in acting out all that he is, rather that he is supported in expressing
whatever is inside, no matter what it is and no matter what it might trigger
in the facilitator.
In addition to the
release of tension that is inherent in the primal and holotropic process and the connection
of present actions to past events, perhaps the most important result of primal
therapy when correctly done is that, given unconditional acceptance, the
client at some point begins likewise to unconditionally accept herself
—
all
of herself. When she begins to be able to do that, she has tipped the balance
in favor of the real self and can be said to be more real than unreal.
That is to say that
a crucial element of the real self is its unconditional acceptance of itself,
and a crucial element of the unreal self is its nonacceptance of the total
self. The unreal self is that part of the personality embodying all the
put-downs, negations, suppressions, and harassments of the self that were original elements
of the familial and social milieu of the developing individual. Thus, when the
individual, in therapy, begins to unconditionally accept all of himself, he
can be said to be identifying more with the real self, an element of which is
acceptance, than with the unreal self, the essence of which is nonacceptance.
I propose that
unconditional acceptance, therefore, is the indispensable element of a primal
therapy whose stated goal is to get people real. It may also be why some other
therapies succeed, to an extent, in helping a person to be more real, in that
they grant unconditional acceptance. Meanwhile some primal therapists
sometimes fail in the same attempt, in that they facilitate abreaction,
tension reduction, and connection but are not be able to grant unconditional
acceptance of a crucial part of their client.
Only Half a Cure
I think
primal therapy can be said to have not fully succeeded when it has only
resulted in a reduction of tension and/or a conscious understanding of present
behavior and thought patterns. These effects in themselves do result in less
in the way of acting out of destructive patterns: They reduce both the impetus
for the act-out and the rationale for it, which had allowed its expression
previously. These in themselves produce a less tense and less personally and
socially destructive individual. But in themselves they are only half a cure.
For a real person
is more than being merely not negative. A real person can be genuinely
positive
—
can be positively motivated and creative, can actively give love,
and can actively operate to alter her environment (social, cultural, and
physical) so that it is better able to facilitate the fulfillment of her real,
higher, needs and her continued growth.
And this stage,
this part of the cure, requires the unconditional acceptance of the total
self
—
real and unreal, past and present, “crazy” and sane. For to be
positively motivated
—
to be able to act in a positive and vital
way
—
requires that one be relatively free of the denunciations and
harassments of the unreal self, which act to negate
—
as the familial and
social milieu once did
—
all actions emanating from the real self.
Thus this part of
the cure requires an identification with the real self or, to be more
specific, an identification with it that is stronger than with the unreal
self. For the real self, of course, unconditionally accepts itself, and, indeed, actively
supports all positive actions emanating from itself.
The Facilitator’s Part
This other
half of the cure, however, is very difficult to bring about without
unconditional acceptance from the facilitator. Admittedly, to a certain extent this part of the cure is possible without the unconditional acceptance of the facilitator
in that in connecting present thought and behavior patterns to their primal
origins, one is able to begin to accept them; for one discovers that one’s
self is not to blame for them. This reduces the self-condemnation
considerably. But this is a shoddy and needlessly long route to
self-acceptance, which can be greatly condensed by a facilitator who is able
to give unconditional acceptance and regard to her or his clients.
Positive
What I am
saying, then, is that, to a certain extent, a truly good facilitator has the
ability to give real love to his
clients. He is able to let them be whatever they are. This is exactly what was
lacking in the first place and reinforced the split, which occurred
prenatally. It is exactly that again
which, when given, can push back the negative tide and initiate the reversal
of the neurotic process.
Enabling
This does not mean,
however, the therapist's engaging in “enabling”-type behavior. Enabling-type behavior on
the part of the therapist involves supporting the client even in her act-outs.
The Recovery movement has made many people aware of how ultimately unloving,
cowardly, and destructive — by helping a person to continue in his or her
addictions, illusions, and negative cycles — is one’s enabling of another’s
act-out.
Unfortunately, these insights
from the addiction and Recovery field have bypassed some of those involved in
the “primal recovery” movement so that enabling is all too common in the
primal community.
In these instances, the
therapist claims to be demonstrating “love” to the client but actually is
hiding a fear of being honest and straight with the client regarding her
act-outs, whether for fear of losing the client’s approval or “love” —
such is
the tangled web of transference/ counter-transference/ co-dependency too often
woven — or for conscious or
unconscious monetary reasons.
To be absolutely
clear, truly
"loving" the client would involve the courage on the therapist's part to
risk emotional and monetary reward by honestly revealing her perspective and
evaluation of the act-out — as gently and compassionately as possible of
course.
This sort of enabling is not limited to experiential psychotherapists; in fact
it is the norm in all too many new-age as well as mainstream counseling.
And it is distasteful, personally, to admit how much of it I have witnessed in
a movement which I have espoused and devoted my life to. Still, it needs
to be said for the sake of those who are not being helped by such so-called
primal therapists. Worse, it exists in the primal community despite the fact that
Janov
(1970), in his first presentation of Primal was quite explicit in pointing out that a truly loving primal therapist
cares enough to “bust” a client about his or her act-outs.
Unfortunately,
a good “bust” requires a really clear therapist
— one who has really done his or her own therapy. And
early in the therapy's evolution it was discovered that too many busts ended
up being act-outs by the therapist. In reaction to this, a more gentle and
less authoritarian primal therapy evolved. (See "A
Primal Perspective on Spirituality," on this site, especially the
first section, titled "Primal
Therapy.")
But
this reaction has sometimes gone to the other extreme where, in the supposed
interests of gentleness or “love,” some therapists have “copped out”
of their primary responsibility to be straight and real with their clients and
have begun enabling them. The crucial difference between gentleness and enabling is
that, in enabling, the therapist does not address honestly, does not confront, or
does not resist the client’s act-outs. "Trying to be nice,” in
this way, is really cowardice (or greed), a fake love masquerading as
and rationalized as being loving or supportive of the client's "self-esteem."
Feeling Bad in Order To Feel Good
The tragedy is that in doing so the therapist
misses opportunities to assist the efforts of the client’s real self in
its natural role of devaluing,
discrediting, and even repudiating the act-out (in traditional terms, this
would be called the efforts of the voice of one's conscience). Because
of a kind of new-age "political correctness," a kind of cult of
self-esteem gone amok, some new-age, including primal, therapists cannot or
will not entertain the seemingly old-fashion notion that the client needs
to "feel bad" about themselves sometimes!
No
one is motivated to change unless they "feel bad" about those parts of him- or herself that are hurting
them and undermining their happiness. In addiction rehab and Recovery
circles, it would be considered unconscionable to step in to derail an
addict's natural disgust, dismay, guilt, and self-loathing about their
addictive behavior and the harm it has done to others as well as
themselves. In fact, interventions, while stressing love for the person
also rely heavily on confrontation —
wherein loved ones point out their
feelings of hurt, disgust, and so on, at the addict's behavior; significant
others are coached to not hold back in telling their feelings about how the
behavior has hurt and affected them. This is also a crucial part of a
traditional rehabilitation program where on "Family Day" the loved
ones affected are asked to show up and hold no punches in laying out their
feelings of how the addiction has hurt them.
While
not denying there are differences between the "tough love" that is a
necessary part of addiction Recovery and what I am espousing, it should not be
overlooked that neurosis is a form of addiction as well —
addiction to self-destructive behaviors. We know that people will hang
on to the negative, even as it hurts and destroys them and their lives,
because at least it is familiar. So it is an addiction to the familiar,
however negative and destructive. Sounds like drug addiction, doesn't
it? Indeed, it
is this addiction to the familiar that is the reason why Primal is the last
choice of those wishing growth, for it really does cause change in the
individual, not simply a patch job or fun and games.
And
of course there are differences between a therapist's and a family member's
roles. Still, as mentioned, rehab counselors know that it is not
at all "loving" to rip client's
off from confronting aspects of themselves that need changing, no matter how
easy it might make the therapist's job or how it might endear them to their
clients.
Experiential psychotherapists should know it as well, even if it means that
the client might be less inclined to book more sessions or less inclined to
like them or praise them up. For as Janov (1970) put it at the outset of
Primal Therapy, the unreal
self is unreal and needs to be overturned,
and he used the word, "violently." By which he meant that
Primal Therapy is not all about lovey-dovey, hearts and flowers, hugging,
and doe-eyed sympathy. If the therapist cannot be an advocate for the real self in its
struggle with the unreal self (the old patterns, addictions,
scenarios) — because the therapist “wants to be nice” or is uncomfortable
with confrontation — the client’s eventual happiness and well-being are
going to be severely jeopardized . . . or at least be put on hold. (For
more on this, see "Primal and
AntiPrimal: Truth and Consolation," on this site.)
Therapist's Duty, Summarized: Being Real
In the final
analysis, a therapist or facilitator has as his or her ultimate responsibility to
be “straight” with their client
— that is, to model “realness” to one
who does not know what realness looks like and is in therapy to learn that.
This means the therapist needs to reflect back, honestly and as gently as
possible, the way that she truly sees the client: when asked, when the
client is ready, or when the client is, outside of the therapeutic
situation, harmfully acting out or dumping on the therapist or other people in
the therapist’s presence.
But again, on the
positive side, in a
therapeutic context, more than merely letting a client be (although
not act out) whatever he is or
even mirroring realness to a client, a good facilitator is able to love enough
in order to support the client in the therapeutic expression of all that he is, no matter what that is. Thus giving
the client a taste of what he never had
— support for the expression of his
authentic self
— the client eventually is able to give that support to
himself, and does not require it of
those around him (a frustrating task at best). The client can, at that point,
be said to truly have his self.
But it is greatly
aided by (I almost said “requires”) “loving” (in the sense of totally
accepting and supporting) facilitators. And these facilitators cannot be
totally accepting and supporting unless they themselves have their selves.
That is to say, facilitators need to be unconditionally accepting of
themselves (they have to be "real" themselves) and so do not require
anything of their clients, even subtly. Having accepted all of their selves,
good facilitators do not require or even wish that the client be one thing as
opposed to another
— have one feeling as opposed to another, get through a
certain feeling faster than is the client’s pace, avoid certain areas, or so
on. However, they can allow the client to be where she is all the time only if
they have enough acceptance of their own selves to not be threatened by
whatever comes up in the client.
Negative
Now, if they
do not have their selves, facilitators
can actually inhibit the unconditional acceptance of one’s self which
makes one real. If they are threatened by certain aspects of what is inside
their client, they will unconsciously (or consciously) act to reduce the
threat in a variety of ways: expressing subtle, or not so subtle, disapproval,
failing to give support to the expression of what the client holds inside,
hurrying the patient along to “deeper” levels of the feeling that are less
threatening, keeping him at more superficial levels for the same reason, and
so forth.
All of these are
“picked up” by the client who is very sensitive to any signs of
disapproval in that they serve to feed
the unreal self which is, by definition, dominant in a person who does not
have her real self and is in therapy to get it. Thus the client learns that
certain aspects of herself are indeed
unacceptable. And this feeling
— no
matter how many other expressions of herself are allowed and how much tension
reduction and connection takes place
— will actively serve to inhibit the dawning of that feeling of the total acceptance of one’s self, which may be said to mark the
turning point in the struggle of the real self against the unreal self.
A Taste of Love
To a certain
extent I believe that a person does not start to become real until he has been
totally accepted somewhere along the course of his therapy . . . whether by a
facilitator, a buddy, a lover, an avatar, or a friend. Without a taste of that total and reservationless acceptance from
another of all that one is, which can also be called real love, I feel that it is well nigh impossible for one to totally
accept himself and to become real, regardless of the other aspects of the
therapy. Thus, above and beyond all, it is love that is the “technique”;
it is love that is “good.” Nothing else matters: For the goal is Love;
loving is also the way.
The Healing Power of Love
— In
Psychotherapy, In Spirituality
Because Love
is the be-all and end-all of any technique that is transformative, it is sadly
much too common that so-called consciousness “techniques” obscure,
inhibit, even defend against that path and goal.
All such “techniques”
— meditation, affirmation, psychodrama, chanting Rama,
tantrism, socialism, past lives, hypnotize
— have only one purpose
— to open
us to love, to get us to feel love, to help us to live love. If they don’t
accomplish that, they are useless. Furthermore, if these techniques obscure or
get in the way of love then they are worse than no techniques at all.
In Therapy
An example might be
helpful. Primal is a technique, and its value is that it can help us to feel.
Its healing power is that it can help us to feel love. This can happen in that
in understanding one’s own Pain, one can understand another’s Pain. Initially, this makes at least empathy possible.
But eventually it makes us
able to understand the Pain of those who are responsible for giving us
Pain
— those who were the perpetrators when we were
victims. This ability
allows forgiveness, and with forgiveness another pathway to love is opened;
or, with the dissolving of resentment, hatred, or anger, another blockage to
love is dissolved.
The point is that
unless the “technique” accomplishes this part, it has failed. In Primal,
for example, there often occurs a stage of “selfishness”; that is, that
selfishness is encouraged when it seems that the person is blocking against
feeling some Pain by claiming that a forgiveness, resolution, or love has
already happened. So the person is asked to go in reverse, so to speak, to
drop the “forgiveness”
— which is in fact a form of denial, a most common
form of defending against feeling —
and thereby to
really feel the hurt. One is asked to really go for one’s Self, and to
really go for oneself. However this has a specific purpose. That purpose is to
allow the feelings, the truth inside, to be revealed. This allows the
understanding and the eventual empathy, the real
forgiveness, and then the love to flow forth.
However, if the
client never reaches those later stages . . . if, for example, the client is
encouraged to stay in the stage of “going for oneself,” of selfishness
throughout the process, and even afterwards (which is what was done in primal therapy, in many cases) then the client has not
been healed at all. The person may be no better off, may even be worse off,
than when she started. At least before therapy there was a defense against the
anger that allowed a show of forgiveness to be attempted
— and who knows, maybe
even allowed a trickle of real love to leak through. But this technique, used
by itself, has only caused the person to be stuck in a selfishness, of state
of victim-hood and of openness to negative energies and patterns of negativity,
which is
hardly pleasant for either her or the people around her.
Therefore, as I
pointed out in the previous section, it is love
alone that heals
— both receiving and expressing it.
In Spirituality
But lest one think
this has to do only with primal therapy, I wish to point out its relevance for
the paths of spiritual growth in general. This should not be surprising
since the primal and holotropic process is a spiritual process, whether one
knows it or not. At any rate, Sathya Sai Baba is constantly
pointing out the importance of love and especially its precedence over
intellect. More specifically, he expounds on the superiority of bhakti yoga — which involves feeling and emotion, devotion, love of
the Divine Reality — to jnana yoga
— which involves awareness, cognition, or understanding of the Divine
Reality.
He gives many examples of this. He explains that jnana yoga can take you there, but that the way is hard and is
easily misunderstood, strayed from, and, almost invariably, going to take
longer. In his Eastern terms
— not coincidentally I
might add
— he is making the same
point that experiential psychotherapists make about talk therapies and
Freudian psychoanalysis.
The Appeal of "Awareness"
Now, in this light —
that of the superiority of a yoga involving feeling
— notice that there
is a real tendency in the left-brain–dominated West to adopt and give
superiority to the jnana-type yogas. Yogas that
fit with our overweening rationalism —
a product of the success of our
technology and science —
are espoused in abundance here.
We see the
mind-control rationality of Buddhism, and particularly of Zen Buddhism, taking leading
roles in the West. Yet these paths are notably lacking in their bhakti-like, worshipful, or even feeling qualities. Being
nonfeeling is, indeed, the unspoken goal in these traditions.
Not that feeling
could be totally absent in them. As long as we are human, we are going to have
some human feelings in whatever we do. But it must be admitted that these
qualities are definitely downplayed, more than that, they are given a
secondary ranking, on these paths, to the “awareness.” This intellectual
sounding word — awareness
— is plenty appealing in the West. My point is, though, that
compared to it, all kinds of feeling are denigrated —
including love feeling
and, specifically, bhakti-like
devotion.
"A Path With a Heart"?
To help us out
here, we might
want to bring to mind don Juan’s advice to Carlos Castaneda, in one of the
most memorable phrases of Castaneda's earlier books, to "choose
a path with a heart.” In light of this advice and of the above example
about primal therapy, one might wonder why there is this persistence of the
tendency to bypass the heart.
Part of the answer
has no doubt already been given: We live in a rationality-dominated,
patriarchal culture. But that does not go deep enough, nor is it all of it.
The fact is that
rationality defends against feeling, and feeling means feeling Pain. Thus the
way of bhakti is going to contain
some unpleasant moments as our unwanted negativities begin showing themselves
to us. The way of the heart means that one will be open to emotional pain,
before one can become detached from it while still allowing it.1 Yet Sai Baba assures his followers that this
— this bhakti way
— is a quick way, the quickest, and even a safe way.
"Too Sexy For My Shirt"
Another reason
might be the ego’s tendency to arrogance. In this culture again,
emotionality is frowned upon, especially in relation to “cool”
rationality. (See, " . .
. The Scapegoating of Feeling . . . ") Indeed, among the young in particular, there is a virtual cult of
“coolness.” Interestingly, this was absolutely not the way of the Sixties
and early Seventies youth, for whom the pendulum swung in quest of love to the
extremes of emotionalism, wild abandon, and addiction
— this being their reaction
to the extreme “coolness” of an earlier era
— the
Fifties.
Nevertheless, the
“cool” way of spirituality appears less threatening for all kinds of ego
reasons. Indeed, it is because the bhakti-feeling
path threatens the ego, and thus “really works,” that it is avoided by
egos.
The purpose of this
analysis, however, is to show why the feeling way of spirituality, the bhakti
way, should not be bypassed. The rational intellectual cool zen artistic
bohemian mindfully aware “Cyberpunks, Hi-Tech Naturalists, Kamikazi
Feminists and Anarcho-Artists” (Alli, 1989-90) route of spirituality might
make us feel temporarily better by inflating our egos, but it is a dead end.
It avoids the heart by avoiding the loss of ego-esteem, the ego blows, and the
eventual bleeding to death of the ego that happens, and is required, on the bhakti
path.
Therefore, as this
analysis shows, it is love that heals
— beyond and before and despite any and
all techniques. With this in mind, it might be understood how this potential
of higher “awareness” is always, and is everywhere, present . . . and how
it need not depend on the presentation to any particular person or even the existence in the culture
of any specific techniques, modalities, yogas, or
“maps.” Life teaches us to love, one way or the other, sooner or
later, this life or another. In
this respect, indeed, the map is surely not the territory.
Note
1.
Sathya Sai Baba says the personality is composed of three gunas, or
characteristics: thamas - loosely translated as dullness, laziness,
slothfulness, ignorance, unfeelingness; rajas - loosely translated as
passion, excitement, emotionalism; and sathwic - loosely translated as
peaceful, balanced, tranquil, contentment. He has pointed out that
people on the spiritual path, generally speaking, start out dominated by thamasic
qualities, advance to a predominance of rajasic qualities, and then on to being primarily
sathwic, although in some measure at all three "stages," all three qualities exist.
Though he goes on to say that liberation involves being free, or detached,
from all three gunas, his statements obviously indicate that going from
thamasic qualities to rajasic qualities is evolution, and so
on. Further, he points out that one cannot go from the thamasic to
the sathwic without passing through the rajasic. This is
rather close to advocating Primal Therapy for us all. The point is, that
the rajasic involves passion and emotionalism. It involves
emotional pain, not to mention everything else that would be considered
passionate. It is superior to being dull. The problem with the
intellectual paths so appealing in the West is that they are so attractive
because they attempt to "jump over" the rajasic and to go from
the thamasic, dull, to the sathwic, peaceful; and of course who
wouldn't want to avoid emotional pain. In fact, as John Lennon sang,
"God is a concept, by which we measure our Pain." And as Sai
Baba says, there is suffering in the world as part of the Divine plan to bring
people to God. So, many people seek the spiritual path because they have
been hurt, or are hurting. Why would they not be attracted to paths that
would promise them freedom from feeling (bad), freedom from hurting?
However, not so fast. The spiritual path allows no such shortcuts, for in
bypassing the emotions on the road to detachment we bypass that which is
critical to it all: the journey to learn compassion and to learn real
love. [return to text]
References
Alli, Antero. (1989-90). New age casualties. Critique. p. 60.
Janov,
Arthur. (1970). The Primal Scream:
Primal Therapy, The Cure for Neurosis. New York: Dell.
Adzema,
Michael. (1985). A primal perspective on spirituality. Journal
of Humanistic Psychology, 25(3),
83-116.
(Also available on this site, click on "A
Primal Perspective on Spirituality.")
Biographical Note
MICHAEL
DERZAK ADZEMA's bio can be found at Mickel
Adzema's writings. E-mail, click on mickel@primalspirit.com. This
article is excerpted from a book-in-progress titled Womb With a View:
Therapeutic and Spiritual Aspects of Prenatal Experience.
Copyright © 2004 by Michael D. Adzema.
*.Editor's Note: This
is the much delayed Part Two of "Reunion
With the Positive (Self): The Other Half of 'The Cure'" published in
the Autumn 1995 issue of Primal Renaissance: The
Journal of Primal Psychology, Vol. 1, No. 2 and uploaded to this site in
early January of this year. This is noted only to clear away any confusion
about the appearance of this article so long after its promised publication in
Autumn 1996; it really is, the article promised. The
reasons for the unbelievable seven-and-a-half year delay -
betrayal, scapegoating, slander, fire, lawsuits, two near-fatal automobile
accidents, fraud, lies, illness, extortion - have the elements of a book of
fiction, though they actually occurred, and they would require a book to
elaborate upon. Naturally, that will not be forthcoming. However,
God willing, Part Three - already nearly completed - will not suffer the same
unfortunate delay; it is scheduled for publication in the next issue of Primal
Renaissance: The Journal of Primal Psychology. [return
to text]
