FREUDIAN PSYCHOLOGY, as a liberal theory, sees people as creatures with infinite wants. Left to their own devices, divorced from the control of society, they would kill, rape, and steal to satisfy their (primarily sexual) desires. But one day, all these violent people realized that the uninhibited pursuit of their aims would eventually result in devastating war. So, giving up their rights to plunder, they created a society both to protect themselves from their own worst impulses and, in he long-run, to help people--as individuals--to satisfy their desires more safely.

The task of the liberal psychotherapist proceeds logically from this view of people. The therapist must deal with those humans who cannot restrain the characteristic primitive urges of the species. He must reconstruct the individual's defenses, enabling the Freudian neurotic to hold back the tide of violence which lurks behind people's social veneer.

Janov's theory of needs is part of another alternative tradition, maintaining that the indiscriminate attempt to pursue wants stems only from people's inability to fulfill genuine needs.

Marx spoke about this process as it occurs in society. People's consciousness, Marx reasoned, flows directly from their mode of productive activity. They begin with needs, which, at first, are the basic demands for physical survival. Other needs arise directly from the requirements of production, which change as each need is fulfilled in society.

The more people are divorced from self-initiated and self-controlled material production, the less they understand the relation between work as an expression and fulfillment of their real needs and the needs themselves. Work begins to appear as merely an instrument towards artificial ends, like money, and the products of work take on a character hostile to the worker.

I have described Marx's view to reveal what seems to be a clear connection between the process of social alienation he describes and the origins of neurosis as outlined in Janov. Both Janov and Freud suggest, as Freud puts it:

. . .the process of human civilization and the development or educative process of individual human beings . . . are very similar in nature, if not the very same process applied to different kinds of objects.

THE DIFFICULTY in Janov's argument arises in his rejection of symbolic behavior for what he calls real behavior. In the return of a person to his self, according to Janov, he begins to behave according to real needs and not according to wants which appear as needs because of neurosis.

But Janov can not reject symbolic behavior in society. Unlike bodily functions, social actions must be interpreted according to a set of shared symbols. For people to reason--to conceive of activity while not in the process of acting--they require a set of symbols whose meanings other people understand. This system is language. Without language, conceiving of anything in the world is impossible, so that our power of conceptualization rests entirely on languages created by society. Alienation, which depends on conceptualization, comes after and not before the formation of symbols. It is in this sense that society creates humanity.

You can not cure society by scrapping symbols; you do not have the opportunity to choose symbols in the first place. A social cure, unlike a psychological therapy, involves creating a system of symbolic analysis through a set of restructured social relations and productive activities, that expresses human needs and facilitates their fulfillment.

THE OTHER GAP in Janov's theory is his understanding of the history of needs. The repressed individual needs rooted in our biological system never change throughout the course of our physical development. My unfulfilled need to be held when I was two would emerge in Primal Therapy precisely as I would have expressed it as an infant, through tears and physical contortions. But social needs change as societies evolve. Each act of production necessitates the act of producing instruments for that production, and so on, so that the fulfillment of each social need creates new social needs. Society is continually creating humankind anew. Reliving the past makes no sense in the sphere of political action.

Primal therapy makes one kind of connection between needs and expression--by calling forth an already ingrained response to needs which arise from within the individual. Social therapy--that is, political action--creates new systems of symbolic analysis through a revolution in social relations, to fulfill real needs people create and define together using concepts that defined and will redefine them.

JANOV, TO improve his theory, must be much more explicit on the nature of needs. Needs which, if unfulfilled can cause neurosis, are communicated to the body by processes within the body. You need no one else to tell you if you have "butterflies in your stomach." But social needs are communicated only by socially created symbols. Therapy provides a return to the self; politics creates a restructuring of systems. The ideal society requires both, but it is foolish to think they are identical processes. Indeed, if a therapy makes the person more individualistic, if it isolates him from other people in social activity, that therapy--no matter how much individual tension it releases--threatens the prospects for social revolution.

I can not evaluate two other kinds of evidence of considerable importance for weighing Janov's final contribution. I am unfamiliar with Janov's "scientific" evidence; his physiological theories and experimental data are contained in The Anatomy of Mental Illness, a book written before The Primal Revolution. I also cannot evaluate Janov's success as a therapist. He has, for example, been calumnized for the current expense involved in Primal Therapy. However, he reportedly hopes to overcome that obstacle as the movement towards his therapy spreads.

It is fitting that Janov wrote his first book in 1970, when the fervor for ill-conceived psychological non-insights was already dying down. Bookshelves may one day be less crowded with self-indulgent speculation on psychology. But whether or not Janov turns out to be a major figure in the field, he is no doubt far down the right track.

Something he should do less is claim the uniqueness of his insights. His theory, as presented, is unique in its structure. But underneath that structure lies a sentiment, which Marx expressed best over 130 years ago. Unfulfilling labor, he wrote, "alienates from man his own body, external nature, his mental life and his human life." When a psychologist develops a theory of real needs, of the relationship between social needs and individual needs, and understands the relationship between changing feeling on a personal level and consciousness on a social level, a revolution may begin to move forward. Whether the revolution will be Primal is not yet clear.