The self-help book that changed John Lennon's life

(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)

Music

Wed 28th Jun 2023 15.00 BST

Bob Dylan once said, “All I can do is be me, whoever that is”. The same sense of wavering identity can certainly be said of John Lennon too. In truth, it can be said of all of us – people change – but Lennon’s stark shifts had an air of searching about them. This is something that has always fascinated us about him and continues to do so, but there was one notable turning point when The Beatles broke up.

There is a vision of John Lennon within his wavering legacy as a circular spectacled fellow with his deep scouse drawl and wicked wit, but it is a surface image that can often mask the true complexity of the character who sported the affectations. In music, Lennon was, as David Bowie once said, “[looking] for ideas that were so on the outside on the periphery of what was the mainstream” in order to apply “them and then make them apply in a functional manner to something that was considered populist,” but he was also trying this in life—compartmentalising the far-reaching complexities of the human character to gain a simpler understanding of himself.

Thus, when The Beatles ended, there was finally a moment of pause in the speeding diegesis of his life. It was at this time that a revolutionary psychologist, Arthur Janov, began drumming up promotion for his soon-to-be-published self-help book The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy, The Cure for Neurosis by distributing copies to notable celebrities of the day. He literally could not have picked a better time to reach out to John Lennon. The star had always sought a sense of belonging, and often this entailed the idea of cults.

Today, some of Janov’s comments prove alarming, almost akin to Matt Le Tissier’s ‘Great Awakening’ revolution. He once proclaimed that his primal therapy was “the most important discovery of the 20th century,” in comparison to conventional studies at the time, which he deemed “the greatest hoax”.

Continuing, he said: “In the future, there will be no need for a field called psychology… [We] would need only 20 per cent of the present medical profession since 80 per cent of all ailments would be cured by primal therapy.” However, in 1970, these new-age thoughts proved alluring to Lennon as he searched for his next chapter.

Therefore, Lennon agreed to partake in a four-week treatment programme in England run by Janov. As Yoko Ono described the therapy in an interview with Uncut: “It’s just a matter of breaking the wall that’s there in yourself and come out and let it all hang out to the point that you start crying. He was going back to the days of when he wanted to scream, ‘Mother’. He was able to go back to that childhood, that memory.”

Lennon would add: “In the therapy, 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.”

Screaming, crying and convulsing en masse was encouraged as a way to lift the malaise of a stiff-upper-lipped surface, to let the atavistic side of life break out. This way of thinking brought about an almost caustic introspection on his solo masterpiece John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band. This is typified on the song ‘Mother’ more so than any other track in his back catalogue. The cathartic release of addressing a long-repressed emotion is palpable in the track. As he told Rolling Stone in an interview upon its release: “I’ve always liked simple rock. I was influenced by acid and got psychedelic, like the whole generation, but really, I like rock and roll, and I express myself best in rock.”

He added:: “I had a few ideas to do this with ‘Mother’ and that with ‘Mother’, but when you just hear, the piano does it all for you, your mind can do the rest. I think the backings on mine are as complicated as the backings on any record you’ve ever heard if you’ve got an ear. Anybody knows that. Any musician will tell you, just play a note on a piano; it’s got harmonics in it. It got to that. What the hell, I didn’t need anything else.”

Thus, simplicity and sincerity became the lifeblood of the album and the next chapter of Lennon’s developing persona.