In a sense, Rebirthing is saying the same thing as Primal.  They're both saying we need to get back to our earliest imprints.  But, Rebirthing rests on the metaphysical assertion: Thought creates.  Primal regards that assertion as nonsense.
     Rebirthing is saying we go back to birth imprints so that we can see if our imprints still serve us in the Here and Now.  If they don't, we can and must change our minds about them and let go old pain so we can think positive thoughts and thus create the positive life we strive to realize.
     It's really rather foolish to believe that your earliest thoughts are your best thoughts, especially if you suffered the typical Western hospital birth.  To the extent that you have your life being dictated to by unconscious, birth-related, negative thoughts that you arrived at when you were younger, dumber, less aware, and more ignorant than you ever will be in your entire life since then, you will probably continually create negatives. 
     Thought is both conscious and unconscious.  Both kinds of thought, conscious and unconscious, are Creative.  
     But, most unconscious Thought has strong negatives associated with it, otherwise we wouldn't be so anxious to keep it out of our consciousness.  And that negative unconscious Thought creates negative manifestations in our life.  As we further react negatively to those negatives our unconscious Thought has created, we perpetuate our grievances.  Then we react further and thus create more negatives.  It's a negative, self-perpetuating cycle.  I believe the reason life doesn't work perfectly for most people is simply that so much negative thought persists in the Unconscious.  
     When I first met Leonard Orr, back in 1978, he told me he believed former Primal patients were the hardest people to Rebirth because they generally preferred to go into the melodrama of whatever was being brought up in them by their connected breathing-crying, yelling, and forcing out their exhales-rather than continuing with the connected breathing that could simply and effectively allow them to let go the old negatives underlying their old pains.
     Since then, I've learned that Leonard's point of view was essentially correct:  People, especially former Primal patients, who insist on "expressing negatives" by "carrying on" during the Rebirth are actually cheating themselves of the relief available if only they would trust the breath to let go their old negatives.
     Why don't they?
     I think it's because pain is safe for them.  They trust themselves to suffer.  It's part of what they believe keeps them alive.  Their willingness to suffer shows they're still stuck in their birth negatives.
     Occasionally, I still run into old Primal patients, some who were at the Primal Institute as long as back in 1971 when I first started working with Art Janov, who are still trying to make their lives work better by feeling their old negative feelings.  They still haven't gotten what they wanted, but they are convinced they will, once they suffer enough.
     Only a week before I wrote this chapter, a fellow who has been a Primal patient for almost a full decade cheerfully announced to me, "Well, I only need to get into my feelings and feel really bad for two days of the week, then I have five days when I'm not into feelings and when my life is going along pretty well."
     I find that strange.  Isn't he really still unhappy during the five days of the week he's enabled to deny the reality of his innermost feelings by virtue of venting them two days of the week?
     If Primaling isn't letting him let go of the old negatives, what is it accomplishing?  On a psychological level, it seems to be just a displaced expression and catharsis with no fundamental healing really taking place, the equivalent of someone's going out and drinking and getting into a bar fight and beating the living hell out of somebody he doesn't know.  
     Many students have asked me, "Well, if what's important is getting back into the peri-natal state that we were in when we established our basic belief systems, doesn't that mean that something like a Primal Scream approach is more likely to work than just this Rebirthing breathing?   Also, shouldn't we try to recreate womb conditions so we can more easily re-experience our Birth Primal?"
     My reply is that duplicating the setting and action is just melodrama it doesn't put you in the same physiological state you were in when you formed your basic imprints.  Thus it doesn't make you fully conscious of them and in a position to revise them.
     So, for example, if you confine yourself in a small dark place where you become restless and frantic, you are still not back in the consciousness you experienced in the womb.  Even if you deliberately choke yourself, you are not back at the state of consciousness you were in before taking your first breath. 
     And even if you convince your mind that you are re-experiencing old events, you are still only focusing on whatever you believe was wrong when you were in the womb or taking your first breath.  Thus, if Thought Creates, you aren't doing yourself much good.
     I have many questions I want to ask of those people who believe that it's necessary to be miserable in order to arrive somehow or other at a state of peace and contentment and joy.  
*            Has it worked?  
*            Aside from the time you've spent crying and screaming about your grievances, has your life changed?
*            Are you getting what you want?
*           Are you the kind of person you want to be?  
*           How long will you continue to make yourself miserable about these old grievances?  
*           When you don't think about them, are your old pains still hurting you?
*           Does feeling your pain over and over serve you?
*            Do you come out from the pained state with a lasting attitude of increased love and forgiveness and joy?
*            Are you really getting over old pain?

Why should anyone believe the Mind heals differently from the Body?
     Sincerely, I believe the Primal process involves getting so bored with one old grievance that you finally turn your back on it and find something else to make yourself miserable over, like a child with two scabs, one on each knee, who after a while, gets tired of picking on one and starts picking on the other leg.
     Picking at a scab doesn't improve healing.  In fact, it delays it.  We all know that.  You don't keep pulling apart a wound each day to find out if it's healing.  You don't pull out the stitches on a surgical incision and open up the cut to make it heal faster.  The best thing to do is to keep the severed flesh in contact with itself and to keep it clean.  It will heal itself.
Healing is a constant capacity of all of our cells, of our entire being.  If we get out of the way and let healing go to work, it works, and it works very quickly.
     By "get out of the way," in connection with psychological disease, I mean if we don't produce within us the negative reactions like rage, resentment, and resistance, that mitigate against healing reactions.
     Certain desires characterize everyone I have ever known, including everybody who was a patient in psychoanalysis when that filled my life for 25 years or who was a patient in Primal Therapy when that filled my life for 7 2 years:  
*            Everyone I knew wanted to get more fun out of life.  
*            They wanted to get what they wanted to get. 
*            They wanted to stop feeling rotten.
*            They wanted to be able to have happy, spontaneous relationships.
     They did not want to understand why they were neurotic.  They didn't want to understand how being neurotic served other neurotic aims inside of themselves.  They certainly didn't want to learn how to compromise, how to put up with disappointment and with half a measure, instead of a full measure.
     Unfortunately, the best they got, most of the time, was indeed only a half measure.  In all those years, I never knew a single person-either analyst or Primal Therapist or patient-who was getting what each wanted out of life. 
     Essentially what I saw them leading were lives of compromise and resignation.  They rightly believed such lives were indeed better than lives filled with negatives crucially felt, but their lives still weren't what they wanted.  Everyone was really super "mature" in saying, "Well, you can't expect to get what you want out of life.  You can't expect everyone to love you.  You can't expect to get something without having to pay more than it's worth for it."
     The theory of Primal work rests on the thesis that the more we feel our primal pain, the more we give up any hope that life will ever be anything other than what it is, the more we finally acknowledge that our early experiences have damaged us irrevocably and irreparably, the more we accept that we will always be in the pain that we're in, the sooner we'll at least stop wasting our efforts trying to become happy, trying to make life better.  We will just acknowledge that this pain is what life is-nothing-just a crock.  But at least we will be "real," we'll feel our pain, and at least not be in denial of it.
     When I first started with the Primal process at Janov's Primal Institute, I thought, "Ah, here's finally some way I can get rid of all those terrible things that must be inside of me which have made it so easy for people to take advantage of me."
     In the very first session, I found an immense, immediate relief.  Instead of being told how foolish I was to cry over not getting what I wanted, I was at least being allowed to cry.  In fact, I was being encouraged to cry, even being provoked to cry, and cry and cry and cry.  
     For me, the relief of finally not having to try to be anything other than damaged goods was an immense relief.  Less effort went into trying to live up to the expectations of others.  I became more authentic and more real.
     However, I didn't become happier-at least not in the sense of being able to get things that I hadn't been getting or in the sense of not being faced with the same old conflicts and the same old problems.
     I just was relieved of whatever private shame and grief I had been trying to keep others from learning about through all the years before I got into Primal therapy.
     Most of the people I knew who went into Primal therapy did so because they felt they didn't have any real friends and no one had ever really liked them.  They wanted to be accepted in ordinary society.  They wanted to be just like the rest of the "kids on the block."  They didn't want to be strange.  They didn't want to be awkward or clumsy.  They didn't want to be too this or not enough that.  They wanted to be OK, and to have everyone else who walked around thinking he or she was OK think that they were OK, too (even though"OK" generally means being thoughtless and careless and essentially turned off and indifferent to both life's joys and life's pain).
     But that didn't happen.
     Instead, what they got from doing Primal therapy was the opportunity to hang out with other people who also felt they had never had any real friends and didn't really know how to have a good time socially.
     They didn't become people who were able to take their place (or what they had thought should be their place) in the ordinary world of happy-go-lucky people. 
     Some Primal patients did manage to forge different lives for themselves that certainly were improvements over the lives they'd been creating before they got into doing Primal process work.  But they didn't get what they had wanted when they entered Primal Therapy.
     And after all, isn't that what life is about?  Don't we really feel happiest when we've gotten what we wanted?  Isn't that what we're trying to do?  
     Now that I'm into Rebirthing, I can understand the reason Primal makes people feel better about feeling bad, but doesn't usually lead to a fulfilled, satisfied life.  
     Primal is saying the "Cure for Neurosis" (as Janov subtitled his first book) is to feel our feelings.  We need to go back to our earliest imprints because they're connected with our Primal Pain and we need to feel that Pain.  If we go on denying it, we'll need to go on being neurotic.  We're healthy only to the extent that we feel our previously unfelt feelings, even if we spend all our time feeling bad over past bad events in our lives.
     But doesn't that seem strange and illogical?
     How can Health be Pain?  Isn't health the natural absence of pain?  Wouldn't you sooner feel good?
     Please understand that I'm not mocking Primal.  I'll always be grateful to Arthur Janov, just as I'll always be grateful to Siegmund Freud.  I'm simply delineating the differences between it and Rebirthing.
     So, as a Rebirther, I believe the reason life doesn't work for most Primal patients the way they hoped it would before Primal is not only that most of their unconscious Thought is negative, but also that they're deliberately occupying their conscious Thought with their Pain.  Since making unconscious Pain conscious doesn't actually make it less painful, their Thought is still negative, and it is still Creating more negative manifestations in their life.  The concept, Thought Creates, explains the inherent fault connected with Primal work and explains why it doesn't help Primal patients get what they want.
     By contrast, I believe the reason life starts to work for people into Rebirthing is that the Rebirthing breath clears out old negatives from consciousness, and the emphasis on using affirmations fills conscious Thought with positives-so the more highly positive Mind creates a more beneficent life.
     Rebirthing says, You, through your Thought, have created the Universe you exist in.  The way people treat you is the way you, in both your conscious and unconscious Thought, need them to treat you in order for you to feel safe and alive.
     If the metaphysics are correct, if it is true that your Thought creates your Universe, then by changing your early negative thoughts and correcting them to positive thoughts about creation and your place in it, you can change your life and get what you want.
     Several years ago, in answer to a query from an individual writing a book about Rebirthing compared to Primal, I wrote the following letter:

Dear Nicholas,
     The Rebirthing breathing is a process where the inhale and the exhale are connected-there are no pauses, there are no holds.  The type of breathing that is done is not the kind that produces hyperventilation, in other words, it is not a forced exhale.  It's not a way of lowering the partial pressure of carbon dioxide.  Instead, it is simply a way of enlarging the inhale.
     So, you are in error when you say that it is a form of breathing similar to hyperventilation.
    The logic escapes me of Art Janov's saying the use of affirmations is like Ellis' Rational Therapy and his reporting that a Primal patient who had undergone Rational Therapy said it was like pretending to feel something you didn't feel.  So what?
What does this have to do with, other than Art Janov's opinion about what affirmations are and his patient's view of Rational Therapy?
     I think that, indeed, he has missed the essence of it. 
     The point is that with affirmations we are training our minds to think only positive thoughts.  
     Yes, Rebirthing is definitely a positive, simplified and spiritualized technique, but it is not a version of Primal therapy.  That's like saying that cleaning up a room is a variation of getting it dirty.
So, clear up your logic because you want people to read your book and respect you for it.  There's no point in making illogical statements and certainly no point in your making ones that are inaccurate.  
     If you are going to continue to pursue the relationship or the similarities between Rebirthing and Primal, then you need to keep in mind that, within the Rebirthing philosophy, all of the psychoanalytic traumata are simply regarded as variations on the birth trauma.  Similar happenings would have no emotional charge for a child who hadn't already laid down the basic scenario through the birth.  Also, of course, they wouldn't be happening.
     I find it preposterous that Janov states traumata are more likely to be found during infancy than at birth.  This goes against all psychogenetic theory and common-sense experience, and I think it may be just a testimony to Arthur's inability to deal with his own birth Primal and to let it go.
     If you haven't already done so, please be sure to do a Rebirthing session so you can actually experience it.  It's really silly to talk about something if you haven't, indeed, experienced it, especially when it is so easily available.  
     First, Primal yourself:  get into your current emergent negative feeling and let yourself feel it intensely until you lose consciousness of it.  Then do a Rebirthing session.  Then you'll be in a position to compare them-to see what kinds of effects each session has.  
     I think that would be more intellectually honest than quoting this person and that person. 
     The reason I'm a Rebirther is that I'm completely convinced of the validity of the philosophical proposition that our Thought creates our universe.  So that's why I don't deal with hallucinatory drugs for therapeutic purposes.  It's also why I don't encourage people to dramatize their old negative feelings.  
     Anyhow, I wish you the best of luck with your paper, and thanks for calling on me.  If you have more such specific questions, please feel free to write to me.
In truth, simplicity and love,
                              Eve Jones

 I think this letter explains my basic point of view. 
     As mentioned earlier, Janov sub-titled his first book on Primal, The Cure for Neurosis.