Guests: Dr Arthur Janov

John's Primal therapy sessions with Arthur Janov in 1970 were the crucial catalyst in Lennon's most emotionally bare album, "John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band". This page includes an interview with Janov together with Lennon's own recollections plus a revealing insight into the therapy sessions by Pauline Lennon."His [Arthur Janov's] thing is to feel the pain that's accumulated inside you ever since your childhood. I had to do it to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.As I realised this it all started to fall into place. This therapy forced me to have done with all the God shit...... Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it...... [It's] facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven."from the Red Mole Interview, 1971"There's no way of describing it, it all sounds so straight just talking about it, what actually you do is cry. Instead of penting up emotion, or pain, feel it rather than putting it away for some rainy day..... I think everybody's blocked, I haven't met anybody that isn't a complete blockage of pain from childhood, from birth on...... It's like somewhere along the line we were switched off not to feel things, like for instance, crying, men crying and women being very girlish or whatever it is, somewhere you have to switch into a role and this therapy gives you back the switch, locate it and switch back into feeling just as a human being, not as a male or a female or as a famous person or not famous person, they switch you back to being a baby and therefore you feel as a child does, but it's something we forget because there's so much pressure and pain and whatever it is that is life, everyday life, that we gradually switch off over the years. All the generation gap crap is that the older people are more dead, as the years go by the pain doesn't go away, the pain of living, you have to kill yourself to survive. This allows you to live and survive without killing yourself."from the Howard Smith Radio Interview, 1970

One morning in 1970 John Lennon received a book through the post— The Primal Scream by Arthur Janov. The book's subtitle was Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis. After John's disillusionment with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's Transcendental Meditation, this new method of psychotherapy became the 'The Next Big Thing' for him. Soon, Arthur Janov was invited to spend three weeks at John & Yoko's home at Tittenhurst Park in order to demonstrate his therapy method. Not long after, John Lennon & Yoko Ono travelled to Los Angeles to experience a course of Primal Therapy at Arthur Janov's Primal Institute.