Issue #4: How Should We Deal with the Inadequacies of Our Parents?
Janov, Marienthal and Buenos Aries
I’ve enjoyed a bit of time off this week but I’m afraid, best intentions aside, that I find myself having done nothing to halt the unremitting expansion of my to-do list or my waistline. What I've done instead is allow the third thing in my life that appears to grow of its own accord - my ‘to-read’ list - to balloon to a size that is already looking insurmountable in the 40 or so years I have left on this spinning rock. It seems that I enjoy cultivating and pruning this list more than I enjoy the reading itself, but there did come a point where I had to check myself, just-pick-something-out and just-actually-read-it.
The resulting compilation of insights from the dusty corners of the humanities library takes you through trauma, poverty and disappointment. Is it any wonder everyone is reading the sciences?
In the issue:
Arthur Janov on how to purge our psychological trauma #psychology
What happens when everyone loses their jobs? #political science #sociology
Danilo Kis on the disappointment of reality #literature
How did the Mesopotamians keep their drinks cool? #history
A cultural primer on Buenos Aires #architecture #art #literature #music
As always, something to think about this week
How Should We Deal with the Inadequacies of Our Parents? Arthur Janov on Purging Our Childhood Trauma #psychology
In ‘I am Furious Yellow,’ episode 18 of the thirteenth series of The Simpsons, Homer embarks upon a new life of zen-like tranquillity after suffering the embarrassment of being immortalised in Bart’s new comic, ‘Angry Dad.’ Although he considers this a form of self-betterment, the recurring motif of the episode tells another tale. Every time Homer suppresses his natural response to go berserk, boils appear on his neck; physical manifestations of his repressed emotions which are all set to kill him before Bart’s climactic prank eventually elicits the authentic fury that had been building up for close to twenty minutes.
Whilst it can be tempting to think, as Homer does, that calm composure is the exterior posture of a serene mind, what we’re learning from his experience is that, if it disguises an authentic self that is suffering, failure to afford that suffering a physical expression can be doing untold damage. It’s good, in other words, to let it all out. It’s good to have a little scream once in a while.
The Scream, Edvard Munch, 1893
In making this point, the episode gives a pop-cultural voice to a long-running trend in Psychology that begins with Freud and takes in some rather interesting characters along the way. Arthur Janov is one of those interesting characters.
In 1970, Janov wrote that he had ‘heard something that was to change the course of my professional life […] an eerie scream welling up from the depths of a young man lying on the floor.’ The young man was Danny (a pseudonym) who had been under Janov’s care after becoming disturbed by an experimental theatre production during which the actor shouted ‘mama’ repeatedly (this was the sixties, after all). Janov thought it could be beneficial to ask Danny to imitate the shouting and, half an hour later, after a scream Janov likened to what ‘one might hear from a person about to be murdered,’ primal therapy was born.
Primal therapy, then, effectively rationalises Danny’s scream as the product of neurotic pain. Here was a patient who had been bottling it all up and was finally returning to those painful moments and giving voice to the suffering he had experienced at the hands of his parents.
Parents, in fact, get fairly short treatment in the writings of Janov. Childhood, for him, is a site of continuous suffering; we start with the trauma of the birth process, journey via unmet physical and emotional needs with the odd detour through adult mistreatment and end, inevitably, at an adulthood characterised by a suffering so unbearable that our survival mechanisms kick in to bury the pain.
‘[I] heard something that was to change the course of my professional life […] an eerie scream welling up from the depths of a young man lying on the floor.’
But the boils are still on our neck, so to speak. Our psyche, according to primal therapy, is split into an ‘unreal’ self which interacts smoothly with society, and a ‘real’ self, existing below the surface, whose pain is the source of addiction, heart problems, asthma and just about any other ailment you'd rather not have.
But when we recognise and name that pain, where primal therapy deviates from more conventional psychological treatments is in its rejection of questioning, analysing and intellectualising the neurosis. For Janov and his followers, what matters is that we feel it; we expel the demons with a good old roll around on the floor and some overdue animosity flung in the direction of Mummy and Daddy. We let out our primal scream.
The work of Janov was a departure from the cultural leanings of the sixties, and spoke to a new form of counterculture that had been emerging in the latter years of the decade. For Janov, seeking freedom through sex, drugs, spirituality, or ‘funky’ clothes is actually a way for people to ‘[act] out a freedom they can’t feel.’ Those well-trodden paths out of mid-twentieth century conformity are all just ways to detach you from your pain. Meditation is not transcendence, it is distraction from the important work of confronting that ‘real’ self with all of his Mummy and Daddy issues and just letting him feel his pain.
This more physical, more confrontational and even more violent (see the video above) approach found its counterparts in elements of the Civil Rights Movement and Anti-Vietnam War protests of the late sixties and early seventies that were also concluding that ‘peace and love’ were inadequate treatments for societal ills that demanded more direct action.
John Lennon, primal therapy’s most famous exponent, mirrored this progression when he shifted from singing ‘all you need is love’ in 1967 to ‘Mama, don't go, Daddy, come home’ in 1970’s ‘Mother,’ his voice howling the lines as the song fades into a very public Danny-on-the-floor style primal exorcism of childhood grievances.
In the years since Janov’s work found A-list cultural cheerleaders like John and Yoko, his scream-the-pain-away cure for neurosis has found itself well and truly side-lined in the world of academic psychology, but every time we coach our loved ones to ‘let it all out’ or not to ‘bottle up’ their emotions, we’re drawing ideas from a psychological tradition that Arthur Janov helped lay the foundations of.
What Can We Learn From the Closing of a Textile Factory in 1930s Austria? #political science #sociology
Imagine all the things we'd do if we didn't have to work. For me, the narrative I tell myself is that I'd read more, write more, be more mindful and connect more closely with the people who matter to me. I'd be more politically active, engaging in my local community and the charitable sector in a way I convince myself would be impossible given my current responsibilities. But if a 1930s study into the psychological impact of unemployment in the Austrian town of Marienthal is anything to go by, all of this is sheer fantasy.
Not far south of Vienna, Marienthal was a town built in the early 19th century around a thriving textile factory, but found itself the object of academic curiosity when its fortunes suddenly changed in 1929 when the factory abruptly closed. Two years after said closure, only a fifth of families in the town could claim to have a member in regular work, and a once active community suddenly found itself becoming a microcosm of an idle society, a Petri dish for the study of the effect of unemployment on the human psyche, and, just maybe, an historical window into an as-yet unrealised future.
Unemployed workers in Marienthal
So what happened? Well a lot of the impact was as you might expect; increased social hardship, hunger, anti social behaviour and alcoholism, to name just a few of the usual accoutrements of poverty, but what was interesting about the findings was the impact on the general levels of energy and vitality of the community.
One man, a formerly avid reader of the newspaper, reported that he now 'just flip[ed] through it and thr[ew] it away,' even though he had more time to read it than ever before. Another woman talked of how she 'used to go for walks, and all those dances' but now didn't 'feel like going out anymore.' Researchers described how the people of the town began to 'drift gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty.'
We're learning something about the nature of work, here. More than just a source of income, what work seemed to provide for the people of Marienthal was a sense of purpose, structure, meaning and, more than anything, a source of dignity. Without their work, without a feeling of contributing to the society to which they belonged, that society began to fall apart.
Walter Richard Sickert, Ennui, c. 1914
Today, the region of Austria Marienthal used to be part of is piloting the impact of one of the world's first universal jobs guarantee programmes. Basically, anyone out of work for more than twelve months is offered salaried employment, raising, it is hoped, the self esteem of the community whilst simultaneously delivering a service that was not there before. Out of great hardship often comes the most radical of solutions.
Extract of the Week #literature
The great Serbian writer Danilo Kis on memory and reality, from 1983's Encyclopedia of the Dead:
'The sea he glimpsed for the first time at 25, from the slopes of the Velebit mountain on April 28th, 1935, would remain within - a revelation, a dream sustained for some 40 years with undiminished intensity, a secret, a vision never put into words.
[...]
That, I think, was why for years he refused to go away on holiday, even at a time when Union organisations and tourist agencies sent people flocking to seaside resorts. His opposition betrayed an old anxiety, a fear of being disillusioned, as if a close encounter with the sea might destroy the distant vision that had dazzled him on April 28th, 1935, when for the first time in his life he glimpsed, from afar, at daybreak, the glorious blue of the Adriatic.
[...]
His romance with the sea is elaborated in this chapter of the encyclopaedia of the dead in great detail, from that first lyrical sighting, in 1935, to the actual encounter, face to face, some forty years later.
[...]
He came back early, dissatisfied with the climate, dissatisfied with the restaurant service, dissatisfied with the television programmes, dissatisfied with the crowds, the polluted water, the jellyfish, the prices and general 'highway robbery'. Of the sea itself, apart from complaints about pollution ('the tourists use it as a public toilet') and jellyfish ('they’re attracted by human stench, like lice'), he said nothing, not a word. He dismissed it with a wave of the hand. Only now do I realise what he meant: his age old dream of the Adriatic, that distant vision, was finer and keener, purer and stronger than the filthy water where fat men paddled about with oil slathered women, 'black as pitch'.
That was the last time he went to the seaside for his summer holiday. Now I know that something died in him then, like a dear friend - a distant dream, a distant illusion (if it was an illusion) that he had borne with him for forty years.'
Danilo Kis, The Encyclopedia of the Dead, 1983
Image of the Week #history
When Colonel Aureliano Buendia faces the firing squad in the infamous first line of Gabriel Garcia Marquez' One Hundred Years of Solitude, the day in his life he remembers is 'that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.'
When my youthful eyes first read those words, I remember being astonished that someone could 'discover' ice, but of course this shouldn't be surprising at all. In hot countries, a long time ago, ice was a very precious commodity. Why wouldn't it be? If the technology to allow for long distance travel and refrigeration didn't exist, ice would be hard to obtain and harder still to keep. In the image above, you're looking at the ingenious solution of the ancient Mesopotamians.
An ice-house was commonly a domed structure, and, just like the ice-berg, it kept most of its heft under the visible surface. In the giant chamber beneath the ground, ice could be kept for several months and sometimes for as long as an entire year.
Ice houses of this sort were used by Alexander the Great around 300BC and archaeologists have found evidence that they were also used in China before 700BC. The oldest known examples, however, are in modern day Iran, where inscriptions on a stone tablet lead us to believe that construction took place as early as 1780BC in the Mesopotamian town of Terqa.
When you're struggling to get that drink down to a palatable temperature, you're grappling with a problem that has a long history.
The Collection | Buenos Aries #architecture #art #literature #music
For this week's collection, a primer on the cultural contribution of a great global city. It's a travel guide, of sorts, from a man who has probably not been to the place he is writing about. I'll leave it to the better informed to recommend hotels and restaurants, but these are the books to pack, the music to download and the paintings to shut you eyes and imagine in the weeks leading up to your trip.
7. Luis Alberto Spinetta’s Pescado Rabioso was a 1970s rock band whose music was characterised by its blend of psychedelic rock, blues, and progressive rock, with occasional touches of jazz and folk. Start with their third album, Artaud.
6. Fileteado is a popular decorative style that originated in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th century, featuring lettering with stylised lines and flowered, climbing plants.
5. El Palacio Barolo, designed by Italian architect Mario Palanti, mirrors the cosmology of Dante’s Divine Comedy. It contains 22 floors; the basement and ground floor represent hell; 1-14 purgatory; and 15-22 heaven.
4. Get a sense of Argentine hospitality by drinking some Yerba Mate tea, a symbol of Argentine identity and national pride.
3. The paintings of Benito Quinquela Martín offer a sense of the physicality and vigour of the port of La Boca.
2. Passion. Invention. Authenticity. Delve into the catalogue of Astor Piazzolla, the master of Nuevo Tango, who's music blends classical, jazz and traditional tango. Start with Tango: Zero Hour.
1. Poetry runs through the streets of Buenos Aires; it’s hard to believe that Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar and Adolfo Bioy Casares hail from the same town. It’s an incredible literary heritage that might be unmatched by any city in the world.
The Examined Life
Danilo Kis contrasts the idealised memory of an encounter and the disillusioning reality upon revisiting years later. Have you ever had an experience that was so perfect in your memory, but when you revisited the location, it didn't live up to your expectations? Why do our first impressions seem to be more powerful than our subsequent experiences? How do you cope with the changes in places or things that were once special to you?
If You Enjoyed It…
Go further by exploring this week's reading list:
Janov, A. (1970) The Primal Scream
Jahoda, M. (2002) Marienthal: The Sociography of an Unemployed Community
Kis, D. (1983) The Encyclopedia of the Dead
Wilson, J. (2008) Buenos Aries: A Cultural and Literary History
Or share with your people here:
That'll be all for this week. Next time, Kafka and the magic hour.
I somehow mixed up story 1 with story 2 and conjured contrasting visions of my parents, lovable and inspiring, and then hideous and loathsome. Maybe the primal scream doesn’t come merely from the trauma but from the incomprehension of how a beloved person can be both.