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How JOHN LENNON gave PRIMAL SCREAM their name [5 min video]
John Lennon lived through 40 years of anything but normality. He was the Beatle with the most wit, charm and mystique, but behind this veneer of good humour and affable charm was a psychologist’s dream patient...
By the 1970s especially, after the break-up of The Beatles, Lennon began to confront the ails of his childhood. John’s wife, Yoko Ono, recalled a confession that the musician had once made to her: “He told me that when he was in his teens, he sometimes used to be in Julia’s room with her when she had a rest in the afternoon,” Ono explained. “And he’d always regretted he’d never been able to have sex with her”. This gives an insight into the Freudian relationship John had with his late mother which was likely sparked through the neurological damage caused by his abandonment and Julia’s subsequent death.
It was in the years of Lennon’s reflection that revolutionary psychologist, Arthur Janov, was soon to be publishing his self-help book The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, The Cure for Neurosis. Janov claimed the primal therapy detailed in the book would end all need for clinical psychologists and distributed copies of the book to a number of celebrities, including John Lennon.
Despite the widespread condemnation for the teachings of the book, Lennon was particularly inspired by the texts at such a self-analytical and spiritual moment in his life. He agreed to take part in a four-week treatment programme run by Janov where he learned to face the traumas of his past through “Primal Scream” therapy that would allow someone to get the baggage of yesteryear off one’s back, Yoko Ono described the experience: “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.” This therapy would inspire Lennon’s 1970 song ‘Mother’, in which he gives us a taste of the screaming.
Now, 50 years later, it appears the therapy hasn’t proved the ultimate answer for psychological issues and it is unclear just how much it really helped John during his four-week retreat. However, one great fruit of Janov’s labours was the name of one of Scotland’s finest rock bands, Primal Scream, who named themselves after this most unorthodox screaming therapy popularised by one of the most legendary idols of the rock and roll world.
