Then he came up with the idea of “exhaustive primal therapy.” Exhaustive means you go on doing it for ten years, fifteen years, twenty years. There is not a single person – many have tried – who is freed from all tensions through primal therapy.

Even Janov himself has no experience of his own being, has no experience of relaxing into the universal life forces, merging, meeting, and experiencing the eternal, the endless, the deathless.

Primal therapy is just a toy. You can scream as much as you like. It is not going to be exhaustive for the simple reason that you don’t have only one life. There have been hundreds of lives before, and an exhaustive primal therapy will mean that all the tensions, all the anxieties that you have gathered in thousands of years which are part of your deepest unconscious, are all released. Perhaps you will need a few lives just to scream, and go on screaming! More probable is that you will be exhausted but primal therapy will not be exhaustive.

Seeing the situation, now Janov does not talk about exhaustive primal therapy…because it is not possible, and Janov has no idea about past lives. If this were the only life, exhaustive therapy would be possible. It is only a question of twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years – you could throw all the rubbish that has gathered in you. But it is a question of thousands of years – it will take thousands of years to throw it. And all the while you are throwing it, your mind is collecting it. So you are in a vicious circle: by the time you are finished with ten thousand years of screaming and you look at the mind, he is ready with fresh problems – start primal therapy again!

These are childish approaches. And it is not a coincidence that all these therapies are born in California. Once you know that a thing is born in California, you can be absolutely certain that it is childish, and it is going to be only a fashion for a few days.

Now in California, people are thinking about primal therapy as if it is something very ancient. They have gone to other therapies because there are other geniuses, and any type….

Now one of my sannyasins who is here invented a therapy – hugging therapy. The whole hour, the whole session, everybody is hugging everybody else…but in California, everything goes, and he was earning a lot of money. The strangest thing is, that you can tell the Californians any stupid thing and they will do it – and they will pay for it! Two hundred and fifty dollars at least. And when you have paid two hundred fifty dollars for screaming in a room for one hour – which you could have done for free – you come out smiling. You have to come out smiling; otherwise what will people say? that you are an idiot; you paid two hundred and fifty dollars and then you screamed for one hour, unnecessarily. You have to come out smiling – a big smile, spread ear to ear – and tell people, “Wow! It is far out!”