The Center for the Sane

The Center for the Sane is located in northern New Mexico and provides an environment for post-primal and pain-free people to interact. The Director of the Center is Stanley Carruth, who did his own therapy at the Primal Institute in 1971-72 and was Director of the Austin Institute from 1972-77.

Is there anyone out there who is sane?

A good "rule of thumb" for determining sane (or pain-free) people is that they never argue. Not because of a fear of confrontation nor as a "number" to get someone to struggle with them. Sane people never argue because there is nothing to argue about. Any argument is pure struggle. Differences of opinion are merely idiosyncratic to the individual. Attempting to get another person to "see your point of view" or to agree with you is silly. Since there is an "objective reality" out there, differences of opinion are limited largely to preferences. (e.g., chocolate rather than vanilla)

By sane we also mean someone who exemplifies the neotenous qualities described by Ashley Montagu in Growing Young. Except in grown-up form, of course.

Perhaps the most salient neotenous quality exhibited in sane adults is that of curiosity. Although there is no purpose or meaning to life per se, expanded consciousness is the essence of being. Like a sane child, a sane adult is always greedy to "know more".

A sane person is bisexual and promiscuous, not unlike our closest primate cousin, the Bonobo. In his book, Our Kind, Marvin Harris addresses at some length the sexuality of the Bonobo and its relevance to Homo sapiens. He further opines on human sexuality in its multiform manifestations.

Heterosexual attraction is prepotent, however, as it reflects the imperative of species survival. The bisexuality of sane human beings is another example of a neotenic quality being carried forward into adulthood. Anal sex is an oxymoron – whether heterosexual or homosexual. Non-procreative sex for human beings seems to serve a similar function to that of grooming in the Great Apes. ( The hirsute Bonobo appear to have the best of both worlds since they engage in both activities.) This example of convergent evolution is not limited to primates however. In his book, Animal Talk, Tim Friend provides a fascinating description of the sexuality of our mammalian relative, the porpoise.

Anyway, promiscuous sexuality brings cohesion and stability to the group and lessens the tensions of everyday life. And, of course, it feels good. Also, human sexuality is an overwhelmingly first-line phenomenon -- second-line affection notwithstanding. It also provides an exchange of body heat and a reciprocal of cutaneous stimulation.

In an earlier incarnation of this web page we ask the hypothetical question "Is monogamy real?"

The answer to our own question is "No".

It would be difficult to imagine a single greater primal defense than monogamy. Implicit in it is being "special" by definition. This is the essence of primal hope. Monogamy is the great rock under which primal patients scurry as quickly as possible in therapy. Romantic love makes demands. It has to be made safe and made to feel "special". It allows one person to control and manipulate the needs, including sexual needs, of another person. It implies a "we" that simply does not exist in objective reality.

Few people privy to Primal Theory appreciate its sequential dynamics. Breaching the defense system in therapy to gain access to feelings is just the beginning. Every primal neurotic is constantly reconfiguring his or her own defense system to accommodate the new reality created by their primals.

One reason that Primal Therapy has experienced such limited success has been the emphasis on primaling instead of upon the concomitant adaptive new defense system that is simultaneously produced. These new defenses must be constantly confronted until there remain no neurotic defenses. Only then can there be said to be a "cure".

Janov opines that neurosis has been the price that individual homo sapiens have had to pay in order that the species might survive. So, in a Darwinian sense, neurosis is a prerequisite to being "fit", albeit in a crazy world.

As Stephen Jay Gould and Ashley Montagu suggest, it is through neoteny, as well as through natural selection, and random mutation - that man has evolved. This is true morphologically as well as rationally and emotionally. Montagu writes that neoteny is "the retention into adult life of those human traits associated with childhood.

For the first time in history, mankind is able to shed what has heretofore been an engine of human survival, to wit, neurosis. Adult sanity is, quite simply, the next quantum leap in human cultural evolution.

Janov provided the world with the key more thirty years ago. It may take millennia for the transition to take place and for Primal Man to truly emerge. And there is no reason to feel sanguine that this will ever occur.

I'm going to end this web page with comments about human dignity. If nothing else, the Bible gives us the "Golden Rule". It is axiomatic to the sane. Shakespeare expressed it best (if floridly) when he had Polonius instruct Laertes, "This above all: to thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man." Self-confidence is not to be confused with self-respect (i.e., human dignity). Even though self-confidence is implicit in self-respect, the converse is not the case. Most "winners" (including Presidents, dot com moguls, Hollywood celebrities, etc.) have considerable self-confidence. Our Western advertising-driven consumption culture worships externalized qualities (e.g., wealth, physical beauty, power, etc.).

However, self-respect is an internalized quality. It suggests an exquisite sensitivity to the "other". The "other" is subsumed in all of nature, and not limited to other human beings.

Dignity is the perfect synonym for sanity.

Now to the point. If there is anyone out there who can make heads or tails out of the foregoing, we would like to hear from you.

And finally, Primal Therapy is a means to an end; not an end in itself.

Site last updated May 21, 2002