AN ECLECTIC APPROACH TO PRIMAL INTEGRATION (1976)

By Michael Broder

Chapter III

MAJOR THEORETICAL COMPONENTS OF PRIMAL INTEGRATION

Facilitating the primal process requires a knowledge of techniques which fall under two major categories: (a) those which facilitate abreaction (the actual primal experience) and (b) those which help the client to integrate thoroughly, primal experiences - through the insight, counter-action and pro-action phases. Before exploring the application of these techniques, it is important to understand the underlying philosophies behind the eclectic approach to the primal process.

A. Breuer and Freud's Cathartic Method

If we who use primal techniques had to look for someone to name "the" founder of "primal", it would be Josef Breuer. In Studies on Hysteria, written in 1893, Freud and Breuer first described primal abreaction.- In addition, they noted "that the ideas which have become pathological have persisted with such freshness and affective strength because they have been denied the normal wearing-away processes by means of abreaction and reproduction in states of uninhibited association and expression."24 Freud also introduced the term liprimal scene" to the psychoanalytic glossary, meaning "fragmentary recollections from early childhood, based on real or imagined experiences of seduction or observation of parental intercourse."25 Most important of all, however, was the fact that Freud developed and introduced the revolutionary concept that all neurosis is the result of early childhood trauma.

In spite of that, Freud spent the most fruitful years of his career in the development of Psychoanalysis, which he himself called a "secondary process". , after concluding that it was impossible to work with the "primary process."26 Perhaps it was due to the kind of person Freud was that we had to wait so long for the re-introduction of primal and "primary-process" techniques.27

B. Rogers' Client-Centered Therapy

Carl Rogers is an influential American psychologist who greatly expanded the freedom which Freud allowed-his patients during free association. Rogers drastically altered the format for the patient-therapist relationship by allowing their interchange to take place without the roles suggested by the authoritarian medical model used by Freud and most other psychotherapists before Rogers. This put the client and therapist on an equal level as two human beings. His concept of "unconditional positive regard" allows the client to feel the freedom to share all parts of himself with the therapist in an atmosphere of trust and acceptance.28

The client-centered therapist presumes to make no value judgments of a client's statement of feelings. He only reflects to the client in a manner which allows the client to use the therapist as a mirror. He emphasizes the key material related by the client in his reflections so as to allow the client to decide his own directions of maturation. Rogers implies that the psyche has a natural healing process, which is beyond the reach of the therapist, because it differs so for each person. The therapist must become the reinforcing ally of the "healing process" in order for a client to first recognize his "self" and then become it.29

I believe this unconditional positive regard is essential while using primal techniques in order to provide the feeling of support and safety one needs to be able to express the irrational feelings which surface when defenses are stripped away.

C. Perls' Gestalt Therapy
Frederick (Fritz) Perls, a German-born psychiatrist with a neo-Freudian and neo-Reichian orientation, is best known for his development of Gestalt Therapy. Although Gestalt puts emphasis on the expression of feelings, the understanding of meaningful patterns in one's life, and the adoption of all parts of the self, it places strict emphasis on present feeling, thoughts and behavior - thereby lacking the intensity of primal techniques - because it does not recognize regression as a necessary next step to the deep exploration of adult feelings.

Nevertheless, Perls' eight30 Gestalt principles are very compatible (except as noted) with the process which takes place both within and outside a primal group. They are:

  1. Live now. Perls believed that when a person is regressed (as during a primal), he is not in the present. I disagree, and believe that primals are present feelings and come within his definition of unfinished gestalts, which - when dealt with - invariably enhance the adult's ability to live more totally in the present.

  2. Live here. When one is primalling, "here" is whatever era of time he is re-living.

  3. Own all of your projections, as well as all other parts of yourself conscious and unconscious. I believe that most therapist interpretations are projections. When I have felt a strong need to interpret, I will look into myself and almost always find myself in a situation of counter-transference. (See section on transference and counter-transference in this chapter). We stress, as Perls did, such substitutions as "won't" instead of 'I can't" and "want to" instead of "have to", when a client is speaking about his patterns although his adult self may not accept responsibility for the difficulties. For example, if a client says "I can't feel loving toward my children", we will suggest he say "I won't feel loving toward my children". When I hear, "I have to take care of my parents", I encourage, "I want to take care of my parents".

  4. Taste and see. Allow yourself to experience what is happening at all times.

  5. Express. Don't judge or interpret. When group members are interacting, I encourage them to make "I" statements at all times. Also when some- thing is happening with another group member which affects them, I encourage them to make an experience of their own out of it.

    When feedback is given in the group, we always speak in the first person in order to make it clear (even to ourselves) that our feedback - no matter how accurate it may be - is simply our projection. Thus, "You come on very coldly" is not acceptable but, "I feel that you come on very coldly to me" can be very useful to both.the giver and receiver of the feedback - because the giver is owning and taking responsibility for something he feels rather than making what he may choose to consider an "objective" evaluation.

  6. Accept no "should" or thought" other than your own.

  7. Give in to your pain as well as to your pleasure.

  8. Take responsbility for yourself at all times.

It has often been interesting to note that primal group members adopt these principles as they resolve their "unfinished gestalts." Thus, it could be said that the primal process is an extension of the Gestalt process, differing mainly in the depth of the feelings expressed.

Many ask, "What is the goal of primal therapy?" As I pointed out in Chapter I, many clients report the feeling of being "that distinct person they were meant to be." More specifically, as they progress through the process, they report changes in their attitudes, beliefs and behaviours similar to what Abraham Maslow called "Self-Actualizing" behavior.31

Self-actualization is a lifetime process. In primal, we believe that each of us will find our own way down to the road to self-actualization, as the roadblocks we formed as children (in order not to feel our pain) are removed. There are as many possibilities of where this road will lead as there are people. Reaching it is the natural process. It is only the roadblocks that are unreal.

D. Freud's Psychoanalysis

One of Freud's revolutionary contributions to psychotherapy was the concept of verbal freedom in the presence of an analyst. This freedom, to "say whatever comes to your mind," Freud found led to the uncovering of mountains of unconscious material. Freud's tracking of thoughts and memories is very similar to what we do during primal integration with feelings - that is - to let them go in whatever direction they go until some insight surfaces.32 I believe that primal integration is an extension of psychoanalysis in that we allow the patient to do whatever he wants to during a therapy session, except to injure himself or another person or break the law.

Often a client will begin a session very confused about what he is feeling. I may ask him to free associate until his body, tone or voice gives some clue to his feelings, an incident in his life, a parent or even a present situation which is blocking him. When this happens, I suggest that he deepen his breathing and sink into the situation - that is, let it overtake him. This will usually get him back to a place where we can resume the tracking process. Often this will lead directly to an insight from either an earlier primal , not fully worked through or to a new area not yet explored primally. The client will then, in many cases, choose to stop and integrate rather than go for more feelings, and possibly overloading himself.

Transference and Counter-transference in Primal Integration. Transference is the process whereby a client displaces or projects feelings, ideas and images onto his therapist, which derive from previous figures in his life.33 At first, Freud considered the transference process to be one which worked against the psychoanalytic process. However, upon recognizing the consistency of the phenomenon, he soon altered his methods - making the transference process perhaps the most important aspect of the therapy. By interpreting his client's transference: for example, "You seem to be behaving toward me as though I were your father," Freud found that many conflicts could be resolved.

Psychoanalysts feel that it is very important for the patient-analyst-relationship to be pure. The less the patient knows about his analyst's own beliefs, problems, attitudes and life style, the freer the patient can be in projecting his fantasies onto him. Therefore, any socializing or relationship outside the analyst's office is taboo during the course of analysis.34

"Counter-transference is defined as the analyst's transference onto the patient, which is a very unhealthy and distorting aspect when it occurs in the psychoanalytic process."34 When primalling, a client is almost always "interacting" with a parent. Therefore, I believe that when a client becomes aware of feelings toward a primal therapist, it should be assumed - unless the client discovers otherwise - that he is interacting in the present. We deal with these feelings in a one-to-one, face-to-face encounter and let them go, as is the case with all feelings in primal therapy wherever the client takes them. Often they go into primals. However, often they do not. As primal therapist, I have gotten some of my most valuable feedback during such interactions.

I recently had a woman complain to me, during a group, that she could not go as far as she might have during her primal because I did not stay with her long enough. While relating this to me, she expressed much anger. A Janovian would have instructed her to lie down and continue the dialogue with one of her parents. Instead I accepted her feelings and realized that she was right. We resolved the issue in the present, and at the next session - at her own suggestion - she connected the anger felt for me onto her father, who also spent very little time with her.

Sometimes, the difficulties have no primal connections at all. I believe that there can be very present feelings of affection, mistrust, fear, anger or sexual attraction between a client and therapist. It is impossible to stay detached as the psychoanalysts suggest. There is too much physical contact and expression in primal. Should a primal therapist maintain the air of detachment necessary to eliminate such present feelings, I would question his ability to provide the safety one needs to primal; when one opens himself up to care for someone, he must allow other feelings to follow.

Consequently, counter-transference in the primal process is also quite common when dealing with the inevitable feelings of the therapist toward the cl ient. It is perfectly permissable and advisable for a therapist to lie down and go right into a primal of his own during a therapy session, if some ripe material surfaces and makes it difficult for him to work with others, so long as a co-therapist can take charge of the group. Of course, feelings toward a client - which are not clearly primal material - are also dealt with in the present. I usually make the distinction between past, counter-transference, and present feelings toward a client by evaluating the situation. For me, if there is present data, I will deal with the client face-to-face. If not, I will look inward. For example, a client who moves very slowly in therapy sometimes frustrates me. That is clearly my counter-transference, as each client is entitled to move at his own pace. So when I feel a strong need to push someone, or give an insight which I consider obvious, yet the client does not see, I will very seriously look into my own needs. I have found that sharing my own primal material with a client who has triggered it builds an enormous amount of trust and rapport between the client and me - as well as within the group in general.

E. Swartley's Primal Massage
Frequently when a feeling is blocked, a client can locate the specific blockage directly on his body. It may come in the form of symptoms such as a knot in the stomach, a headache, back pain or tight chest. The common denominator is usually pain or tightness. It is here that we apply primal massag of body armor to intensify, slightly, the pain or tightness to the point at which the client begins to emote.

Primal massage as deveoped by William Swartley36 is applied with the fingertips only at the point at which the client indicates he is blocked. He may do this either consciously by saying or pointing unconsciously, by grasping a specific area or obviously holding it in as resistance to the pain. Firmly massaging the area will either cause the abreaction to intensify or have no result, except perhaps to reduce the pain in that spot, thus allowing another defense to take over.

F. Lowen's Bio-energetics

Bio-energetics is the neo-Reichian school which first emphasized the bodily acting-out of feelings. Bio-energetics, as practiced by Alexander Lowen and his disciples, does not - in my opinion - allow for the maximum flexibility of the client, in that it is too highly structured by the thera- pist. However, it was Lowen who first introduced some of the most widely used methods for expressing primal feelings. They include pounding on pillows to express anger and rage, experiencing pure longing by reaching up and calling for one's parents and allowing one's body to freeze with fear37

A primal session could therefore look identical to Bio-energetics with one major difference. In Primal Integration, we do not encourage expression, we encourage feeling. The expression then becomes automatic at the client's choosing, either conscious or unconscious.

In Bio-energetics, the expression is encouraged at the verbal suggestion before the client has moved to an affective level. We have found that the feeling that is really "ripe" is often not the feeling that the client talked about at the beginning of the session. Something entirely different may come to the surface once a client begins to freely track it. Therefore, Primal Integration allows the client's body and his unconscious to determine the material on which he works rather than his conscious thinking process, which could conceivably be programmed to choose safer material than that which is more critical.

G. Desoille's Guided Fantasy

Guided Fantasy as taught by Robert Desoille38 and Hans Carl Leuner39 Is an extrememly powerful tool in penetrating the defense system. During a guided fantasy, the client is encouraged to relax as much as possible. The suggestions given to induce this state are similar to those used in hypnosis.40 . Once the client is relaxed, the fantasy trip can begin. A typical fantasy trip may go as follows:

Therapist: Imagine yourself getting very,-very small ... about half your present size. (Pause about two minutes). How old are you right now?

Client: Six years old. (The client invariably gives an age other than his present chronological age).

Therapist: What are you doing?

Client: I am in my room.

Therapist: Describe your room.

Client: (He is encouraged to go through a lengthy and very detailed description of his room, including colors, furniture, etc. The purpose of this is to give the client as clear an image as possible).

Therapist: What are you feeling now?

Client: Scared. Daddy is coming home from work. He is going to be mad when he finds out that I didn't come right home from school and I worried Mommy.

Therapist: Sink into the scared feeling. Let your breathing get deeper. (I pause for a long time).

Client: He's coming home now.

Therapist: What do you want to do?

Client: I want to hold my breath and be strong.

Therapist: Stay with the feeling. Breathe.

Client: Daddy, I am scared of you! (He is now screaming cries of terror). Go away! (In this instance, the client at this point instantly switched to another scene about a year later when his father was separating from his mother). Come back, Daddy! Please don't go! Come back Daddy! I didn't mean it! (The scene where he wanted his father to go away triggered the guilt he felt when his father left the house permanently. He felt that his father was leaving because of the earlier desires for him to go away).

This is an illustration of how a relatively mild and perhaps seemingly unimportant scene produced many years of guilt previously untraceable to a real ause. The fantasy trip stirred up the fear. Once we had this feeling, we abandoned the fantasy trip in favor of the feeling which tracked automatically to a major primal scene, the father's leaving. After the guided fantasy, the patient was ready to.work quite autonomously with nothing more than support rom another group member.

H. Moreno's Psychodrama
Psychodrama is a technique in which the client acts out meaningful situationals in a therapy session with others role-playing key figures in his life. often used in primal groups where an individual is having difficulty with a past or present relationship. We suggest Psychodrama appears difficult to reach an affective level without an external response, which is usually known intellectually to the client beforehand.

Psychodrama, a method developed by Jacob Moreno, has been widely used in many therapuetic situations. The goal set down by Moreno was "emotional understanding of one's relationships with others and their effects on one's life."41.

In primal, the goal is similar, but the psychodrama itself stops when an affective level is reached.

A typical example of how this happens can be summarized as follows: A woman was telling the group how her mother would always criticize her whenever she failed to be the best at whatever she was involved in. Whenever she succeeded, there was no recognition. We had her pick a mother out of the group who listened to how she failed to get the part of Cinderella in school. Instead of giving her the comfort she sought as a child, the "mother" proceeded to lecture her as to what she "should" have done in order to get the part. This almost immediately triggered tears of hurt which turned into rage.

Psychodrama is usually not suggested for extroverted clients who use verbal behavior as a defense. They have no problem acting-out roles. It seems to help tremendously in cases where clients are more introverted and find a defense in staying inside themselves.

I. Perl's Gestalt Therapy (Part II)

As I noted earlier, Gestalt Therapy is similar to Primal Integration, except for its intensity. It is also similar to Psychodrama. Perls' most significant contribution was the concept of talking to key figures as though they were in the therapy room. Perls stressed the idea of the client carrying out a dialogue by "being" both parties of an interaction,42. This is rarely used in primal , because it requires too much thinking. We have found that the point at which the client has to switch roles (as a Gestalt therapist would instruct), is usually the point at which deep feelings are beginning to emerge. That is when we encourage deep breathing and intensifying the feeling.

Perls' method of working with dreams is frequently used in Primal Integration. The method is a very simple one and one which clients learn very quickly to use when they bring a meaningful dream to their therapy session. Basically it involves describing a dream as though it were happening in the present, and becoming - that is - acting out - various parts of the dream. When an affective level is reached, one stays with that feeling until the message behind the dream is felt as well as understood.43

Gestalt in combination with primal has many possibilities; many new techniques combining these two schools are under study.44

J. Jackins' Re-evaluation Counselling

Harvey Jackins, the developer of Re-evaluation Counselling, has made one great contribution which has become widely used in primal groups through-out the country; the concept of peer co-counselling.45

Jackins has set up a network of training centers. Groups of about twenty meet in elementary co-counselling under supervision within the class. Later, students arrange to meet in pairs between classes to co-counsel. Emphasis is on talking through problems in a way that encourages discharge of feeling. The co-counsellors simply support each other, validate the feelings that emerge, and help keep the "client" focussed on present time.46

Summary

Primal Integration is thus a synthesis of many orientations. Primal Integration operates under the following principles:

In the techniques and theories described above, the emphasis is on inner-directedness. Primal processes as well are most effective when inner-directed. This means that each client does ninety-nine percent of his own therapy. As he learns how to track his feelings, he needs little more than a place to primal and another trained person to support him. who will not push or let his own neurosis interfere with what the client is experiencing while primalling. This is all a client needs to continue his primal exploration between formal therapy sessions as well as when the times comes for him to move out of formal therapy.

Within a primal group setting, by having clients work in pairs using guidelines plus a reasonable amount of supervision, it is possible for more than half the group members to work simultaneously. This makes a group the most practical setting in which to primal. It also promotes a deeper interaction and sense of trust between members than is found in most therapy groups. Many who go through the primal process find peer support very instrumental in providing them with the strength to explore their deepest feelings.

In the next chapter I shall illustrate how these techniques are used during primal integration.

_____________________

24 S. Freud and J. Breuer, Studies on Hysteria, London, Hogarth Press, 1893, p. 46
25 J. P. Chaplin, Dictionary of Psychology, New York, Dell Publishing Company, 1968, p. 378
26ibid., p. 442
27 Swartley, Primal Abreaction Training Programs, Toronto, Center for the Whole Person, 974, p. 20
28Rogers. Client-Centered Therapy. Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961 pp. 131-196
29ibid., pp. 28-31
30Perls, Hefferline and Goodman, Gestalt Therapy, New York, Dell Publishers, 1951, pp. 130-135
31 Maslow, Motivation and Personality, New York, Harper and Row, 1954 pp. 203-234
32 Freud, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis, New York, Simon and Schuster, 1924, pp. 112-113
33 Rycroft, A Critical Dictionary of Psycho-Analysis, Totawa, New Hampshire, Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1973, p. 168
34 Kubie, Practical and Theoretical Aspects of Psvchoanalvsis, New York, International Universities Press, Inc., 1950, pp.57-59
35 Rycroft, op.. cit. p. 25
36Swartley, Massage of Body Armor in Primal Inteqration, Mays Landing, New Jersey, Center For the Whole Person, 1974
37 Lowen, The Betrayal of the Body, New York, MacMillan, 1967, pp. 209-232
38 Desoille, Directed Daydreams, New York, Psychosynthesis Research Foundation,7965
39 Leuner, "Guided Affective Imagery", American Journal of Psychotherapy, Vol. 22, No. 1, 1969, pp. 4-22
40 LeCron, Self-Hypotism, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1964, pp.49-63
41 Moreno, Psychodrama, New York, Beacon House, 1946, Vol. I
42Perls, op.cit., pp. 5-70
43 Perls, ibid
44 Marcus, Gestalt Therapy and Beyond, Los Angeles, 1974, Speech delivered to International Primal Association
45 Jackins, The Distinctive Characteristics of Re-Evaluation Counselling, Seattle, Washington, Rational Island Publishers, 1973, pp. 5-8
46 Kelly, The New Education, Santa Monica, California, Interscience Research Institute, Inc., 1972, P. 42


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