#tff1979

The Quietus (20.09.2013):

RO: I had a guitar teacher, and she introduced me to a book called 'The Primal Scream' (by Arthur Janov). And I read it, and it became my Bible. The theory is called The Tabula Rasa theory, or the ‘Blank Slate’ theory. A child is born a blank slate, and then all the terrible things that happen to it – the childhood trauma and the rejection, not enough love – become suppressed and then turn up as neuroses in later life. The therapist would try to lead you to recall something that happened to you, and your way of mourning – and it’s a deep way of mourning – is that you actually cry. Not as an adult, but actually in a sense you’re going really, really deep. CS: It’s not a novel idea. I just think Janov explained it in better terms than most people. RO: I converted Curt, you might say. I suppose both of us were believing we were victims, so we would quite often try and convince other people of the validity of Janov’s ideas, but no one would… I suppose we were the only two. You know what it’s like when people have a specific belief and they don’t have any room for anyone else’s beliefs: it’s a turn off. And I was definitely one of those… <...> RO: The Hurting was one thing: pure Janov. CS: What changed that for me was actually meeting Arthur Janov. RO: We broke it really big with Songs From The Big Chair, both in England and America, and then he became hyper-aware of who we were. So we were doing four nights at Hammersmith Odeon, and he came to one of them. We met in the dressing room afterwards. I spoke to him a couple of times on the phone, and we all met up for lunch – me, Curt and our partners – in some fancy restaurant in Chelsea. CS: He proceeded to ask us whether we might be interested in writing a musical about primal theory. At that point I lost the plot. RO: It was one of those situations. CS: Basically it was as if God had come down and said that he wanted you to find ways to make him money. It would be like God taking sponsorship. RO: The words to the musical were just literally… CS: I don’t think lyrics were his strong point! You know, there are some words you don’t put in songs, and long psychological explanations are really not things that songs are written about! I was destroyed after meeting Arthur Janov. RO: I ended up doing primal therapy after Big Chair and during Seeds Of Love, and then I realised so much of you is your character, and you’re born like it. I think that definitely any trauma – whether it’s childhood or later in life – affects you negatively, especially when it’s suppressed, but there’s so much of us which is already in place. I believe that primal theory – which has been absorbed into modern psychotherapy practices – is very, very valid, but a good therapist is a good therapist. He doesn’t have to be a primal therapist. CS: When he actually came to the show, I was talking to him for a while, and he said "I don’t think you need therapy", which was fantastic for me to hear. After that lunch, I didn’t feel like it anymore.

Super Deluxe Edition (22.02.2022):

I ask Roland and Curt if either of them still practice Primal Therapy, Arthur Janov’s trauma-based therapy that informed so much of the songwriting on their 1983 debut 'The Hurting'. RO: Well, no… [but] maybe I should? I did it in the ’80s for five years, very regularly, two or three times a week and it was amazing. It was really about my childhood. And, strangely enough, when my first son was born, Raoul, something happened psychologically, because I saw him come out, and it was like my childhood was over. I don’t know why, but I was no longer focused on the child within, I was focused on the child ‘without’. So then you become a parent and part of what you do is very structural. We weren’t too big on discipline, but enough, and your inner child gets kind of shooed away for many, many, many years, and I stopped using any of the therapeutic techniques from Primal Therapy. And I got older, I sort of got into addiction problems, and I actually lost the ability to express myself emotionally. I’ll give you an example: My father died when we were doing 'The Seeds of Love'. And I was like, ‘fuck him’, you know. That day I had therapy, and as I was walking from England’s Lane, where we were making the record, to therapy, I went from denial to a wave of absolute grief. And before I even got there, I was crying like I’ve never cried, because of the reality. Now, when it came to Caroline dying, I couldn’t do it. I’d lost completely, through all the pills and booze, I’d lost the ability to get that wave of grief that comes up from a very deep part of you, and to let it go. I couldn’t do it. And it wrecked me. That inability wrecked me. So no, I had to do therapy to deal with the grief, but I actually found a woman in LA who was a Freudian therapist – Freudian! – crazy, but it was an amazing relationship. Through that, plus the love of a good woman in Emily –  that really got me back on track. CS: I never felt the need. I think it was knocked out of me by meeting Arthur Janov. I think that I kind of lost faith in Primal Therapy because it was coming from a man who I thought was a bit of a charlatan, after meeting him. My therapy happened in later years, some in New York or in Los Angeles. The relationship with the therapist is always a very personal one – you’ve got to find a therapist that works with you. And it’s not even necessarily a method, I think it’s actually a relationship you have with them. Mine happened to be a 70-year-old hippie that had taken all sorts of things when she was younger, and she was fantastic. But no, Roland’s correct, when children come along it really changes the picture, a lot. And weirdly, that put me off Primal Therapy theory a bit more because a lot of what Janov was writing about back then was very much about children being this ‘blank slate’ being fucked up by parents and you see your kids come out and you watch them grow up and it’s like, that was never a fucking blank slate, it just wasn’t. There’s DNA there. The way they look, the way they behave…

Rock & Roll High School with Pete Ganbarg podcast, se4ep10 (10.2024):