Is Screaming Therapeutic?
Feeling your feelings is the new modern-day catharsis
Therapy can take on many different forms these days. There’s texting therapy. There’s teletherapy. There are even therapy sessions that allow you to chat with a therapist while you jog.
In the 1960s and ’70s, there was screaming. Introduced by California psychotherapist Arthur Janov (and practiced by John Lennon and Yoko Ono), it was called “primal therapy,” and while you might think it’s because screaming is primal or animalistic, it’s actually because Janov saw certain pains or trauma from early childhood as “primal” in nature.
The idea was that people repressed these pains and traumas, which allowed them to contribute to everything from mental illness to asthma. Janov claimed that by releasing and reliving these traumas through emotional catharsis, often in the form of screaming it all out, people could heal.
The (pseudo)science of primal therapy
Janov has been quoted as saying that:
“Painful things happen to nearly all of us early in life that get imprinted in all our systems which carry the memory forward making our lives miserable. It is the cause of depression, phobias, panic and anxiety attacks, and a whole host of symptoms that add to the misery.”
