If the pressures of modern life are making you feel like you’d love nothing more than to scream your heart out into the void, you’re not alone. Sensing the zeitgeist, in 2020 the New York Times launched their Primal Scream Line with the offer to “scream after the beep”. More recently, in September 2022, the Screamatorium experience came to London’s Leadenhall Market, offering visitors the chance “to really let it out with a big old scream into a decibel meter”. In a similar vein, you might have noticed the rising popularity of “rage rooms”, such as those in Norwich where you can “take your ‘weapon of choice’ and destroy a variety of household objects, from old china to flat screen TVs or computers”.
After years of a pandemic, a deepening cost of living crisis and war in Europe, perhaps it’s little wonder that many of us are desperate to let out all our pent-up stress and anger. But scream therapy or primal therapy is nothing new – it actually started life in California in the 1970s as a fringe approach developed by the Freudian analyst Arthur Janov. He claimed that performing intense screams (and doing other infantile things such as sucking our thumbs) could help us heal childhood traumas. His book, The Primal Scream, sold over a million copies and he counted John Lennon and Yoko Ono among his followers. Janov wasn’t shy in advocating his approach, either – he said it was the most important discovery of the 20th Century and could cure 80 per cent of ailments.