More on Feelings

A story from my life.   I had just finished writing the Primal Scream which sold in the millions worldwide.  Before the sale,  a copy of my manuscript was lying on the kitchen table.  My father came in for his yearly visit and walked by the kitchen to see his grandchildren.  On his way in he saw the manuscript and asked what it was.  I told him it was a book I just finished called the Primal Scream.   He walked by and rummaged through the pages in about one minute, not reading any of it and said, “we know all that”.  And walked on.  That was what he thought of my years of work. He denigrated me and made me feel stupid daily and so when it looked like I did something smart he had to dismiss it. He was terrified of looking and being dumb.  He never considered the impact it had on me; it was part of his daily rituals, “Hey stupid, hand me that tool.”

His only way to feel superior was to make me feel inferior, like he felt down deep.  And throughout my early life I felt completely stupid; never once thought of going to college, convinced I could never make it.

My early primals were always, “Say I’m OK, just once, please“. Never to come   “I begged, could you cherish me a little?  Say I’m good.  Tell me that you like me.   I am your son.    He could not because he felt the same way, and could not offer anything to me because his whole system needed it first.  There was never a book, a record or even a magazine in the house.  All he read were detective horror murder stories with those ugly drawings accompanying them.  Of course my mother was illiterate so she could never read; she signed with an “X”. We never had one conversation in her whole life.  She lived on a different planet.   My father treated us like dogs.  He never talked directly to us and when they left to go to the insane asylum for my mother for years there was not a minute of explanation.  We were given over to strangers; my sister to another strange family.    We were never close after that.

What  I hear in patients who are primaling,  when I ask them to beg their parents for love, “What’s the use, they are unfeeling robots so what is the point”?  The point is that this need for approval and love is still there and never goes away.  It has to be relived; it is their own private feelings inside them no matter how robotic parents are.  I too felt, what is the use?  But I know I had to feel that deep deep need and be rid of it.  So I needed to plead to my father just once: “Say I’m good, please just once, say I’m good.” ……… Never.

Of course in school I get involved with the most critical colleagues and tried to make them like me; what a struggle;  all driven by feeling so unliked.  Just like my father who felt like a failure and finally as I wrote previously: he was  driving down the street, I was twenty something  and without looking at me, staring straight ahead, bemoans, “I feel like a failure”.  There it was, twenty years late and much too late to change the deep-seeded imprint that destroyed my life. He never looked at me. He just had to get this feeling out to no one in particular. It was his mini-primal. It was never the same problem with my mother because she was lost in her world and had no plans for me; never knew where I went to school or if I went to school and did not care. I played hookey a lot,  missed key classes. It was no loss as I was so anxious I could not listen or pay attention and certainly could never learn.  (All my class notes say, Janov is nervous).  But she never tried to make me into anything and that was life-saving. They were Russian peasants, after all, chased out of Russia by the Cossacks. They never had a life, either. I fell close to the tree but fought my way out of. I discovered something to save my life; and oh yes, the lives of many others.

So now if you ask if I started out to change the world?  I would say “No, I just never wanted the world to change me.  I never wanted to join their world. That would have been the end of me”.