Scream therapy

Scream Therapy is a form of psychotherapy that uses screaming as a therapeutic tool. In many cases the term is mistakenly used in reference to Primal Therapy.

There was never any such thing as “Primal Scream Therapy”, as some refer to Primal Therapy which was developed by Dr. Arthur Janov and first brought to the awareness of the public in his book entitled The Primal Scream (1970). In many subsequent books, Janov has distanced Primal Therapy from “scream” therapies. Some twenty years after The Primal Scream, he wrote:

Primal Therapy is not just making people scream. It was the title of a book. It was never ‘Primal Scream Therapy’. Those who read the book knew that the scream is what some people do when they hurt. Others simply sob or cry. It was the hurt we were after, not mechanical exercises such as pounding walls and yelling ‘mama’.”

— Arthur Janov^[1]

A Scream away from Happiness, by Daniel Casriel, M.D (1972), introduced a scream therapy which was quite different from Primal Therapy. Casriel was aware of Janov’s work and pointed out the differences, the main ones being the heavy emphasis in Casriel’s therapy on screaming and the use of a group setting rather than the mixture of individual and group therapy used by Janov.