The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography

by Alejandro Jodorowsky

  When a child has unconsciously been given an abominable name, such as that of a sibling who died before he or she was born, that of a relative who committed suicide, or other tragedy, I advise changing the name. To prevent the child from feeling dispossessed of her identity, she should be given two small boxes, one gray and one gold. “In this gray box you will keep your old name.” On a simple, opaque card, the mother or father writes the child’s name and puts it in the gray box. “And from this box”—the golden box is opened and a brightly colored card with cheerful decorations is taken out—“you get a new, better name.” And they read the new name on the card. “From now on you will be called by this name. When you want to remember your old name, take it out of the gray box for a moment, greet it, then put it back again.”

  For divorced women who cannot get over the anger they feel toward their ex-husbands, I have advised sticking a photograph of the man’s face onto a soccer ball and kicking it around.

  I have advised people who were never cuddled to get their partner or a friend to give them a long massage using acacia honey instead of oil, completing the massage by rubbing them all over their body with a photo of their mother in the left hand and one of their father in the right hand.

  Sometimes I have used active poetry as a remedy for people who suppress their feelings. I told a frustrated musician to get up at dawn and listen to the songs of the birds while repeatedly saying, like a litany, “They are happy because I exist.” I told a woman who felt nonexistent to stand in the middle of a bridge at midnight in the summertime, repeating many times while looking at the current, “The river passes but the reflection of the stars remains.” I advised a man who suffered from thinking that he was fundamentally disagreeable to whisper in the ears of a hundred people (relatives, friends, colleagues, etc.), “A single firefly in the dark night lights up the whole sky.”

  Little by little, I was daring to propose more complex acts. At the time of writing, every Wednesday, without any advertising and always for free, aided by the Tarot I prescribe psychomagical acts to around twenty people. Fortunately, my partner, Marianne Costa, has taken notes of this advice (which can be found in Appendix I of this book), because I, being in a state of trance, forget it after a few minutes.

  I once gave a series of interviews to Gilles Farcet, which was published in the book Psychomagic. His readers wrote to me asking for private sessions, which I did for a year in order to confront important problems and to experiment with new directions in this form of therapy. Many psychoanalysts, osteopaths, and doctors of so-called New Medicine (students of Dr. Gérard Athias in the south of France) took my courses and applied them to their disciplines. Later, the SAT Institute (Seekers After Truth), headed by the psychiatrist Claudio Naranjo, a direct disciple of Gestalt therapy founder Frederick Perls, invited me to teach some courses in Spain and Mexico, where three hundred future therapists learned the techniques of tarology, psychogenealogy, and above all, psychomagic. I also formed groups of students of the psychoanalyst Antonio Ferrara in Santiago de Chile, and then in Naples. To convey this art, which I practiced in a state of trance, I had to force myself to find “laws” that would allow scientific minds to delve into its mysteries.

  Psychomagic is fundamentally based on the fact that the subconscious accepts the symbol and the metaphor, giving them the same importance as real things, which was also known to the magicians and shamans of ancient cultures. For the subconscious, acting on a photograph, a tomb, a garment, or some intimate object (one detail can symbolize the whole) is the same as acting on the real person.

  Once the subconscious decides that something should happen, it is impossible for the individual to inhibit or completely sublimate the impulse. Once the arrow is launched, one cannot make it return to the bow. The only way to free oneself from the impulse is to fulfill it . . . but this can be done metaphorically.

  Many children who have been disliked by their parents grow up with the desire to eliminate them. While they do not do this, they remain submerged in a depression that can lead to suicide, addiction, or fatal disease. For these people I recommend hanging a portrait of the mother from the neck of a black hen and a portrait of the father from the neck of a red rooster. Then they should cut the throats of both chickens and bathe in their blood. After plucking them, they should cook them and serve them at a party with a group of friends. The black and red feathers and the other remains of the animals should be buried and a sapling planted above them.

  Cases of female frigidity in which I detected a sexual fixation on the father have been cured by the recommendation that the woman print a photograph of her father on a t-shirt and make love with her partner while he wears that shirt. Thus, metaphorically, the incestuous desire is fulfilled and overcome. One woman who came to see me suffered from wounds and burns in her vagina each time she made love. Looking at her family tree, I could see that at age thirteen she had been separated from her Italian father. To conduct the metaphorical incest, I suggested that she cook a package of spaghetti in three liters of water. She should then send the spaghetti in a bag to her father and douche with the cooking water. She was cured.

  It is not possible to eliminate an anxiety or an irrational fear by trying to reason with the client to show him that what he fears can never happen. One must push him toward the anxiety in order to bring about, metaphorically, what he fears so much. In this, I was inspired by an anecdote from the American psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who, as a child, saw his father’s workers trying to get a stubborn bull into the corral. The bull refused to budge. For all their pushing, they could not move him. Erickson approached them, took the animal’s tail, and tugged on it. Feeling that he was being given an order to retreat, the stubborn bovine took off running toward the corral.

  When a person feels possessed—by somebody in her family, a witch, or some evil person—it is impossible to convince her that this is not the case by giving reasons. However well she may accept it intellectually, her emotional center will reject it. She must be treated as a possessed person and must submit to an act that resembles an exorcism. To accomplish this, her entire body should be covered by copies of a photograph or a drawing of the invader, stuck on with a mixture of clay, flour, and water. Then these images should be ripped off while yelling furious orders such as, “Out! Leave this person in peace! Go back to yourself!” Once they have all been torn off, the patient should be bathed, perfumed, and dressed in new clothes. The photographs should be buried and a chrysanthemum planted there.

  It may also be advisable to make a fake identification document for the patient with a false name, age, and profession, to mislead whoever wants to possess him. In some central European Jewish families, when someone is gravely ill they call the rabbi to change his name. Thus, when death comes to look for him, it will not find him.

  The psychoanalyst Chantal Rialland, who studied with me for many years, writes in her book Cette famille qui vit en nous (The Family That Lives in Us), “With regard to the child, the parents feel anguish as a function of their own problems, as a consequence of their childhood and adolescence. They feel this with all the more intensity if the father and mother have felt unwanted, rejected, or not conforming to the family’s wishes: ‘We hope everything will go well and be normal,’ ‘We hope the birth will be easy.’ Perhaps the last birth in the family was difficult, or perhaps one of the women in the family died in childbirth, a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, or aunt: ‘We hope it won’t be as bad as it was for Grandma Agatha,’ ‘We hope she won’t be a druggie like our cousin,’ ‘A whore like our aunt,’ ‘Unfaithful like Grandmother Ernestine,’ ‘We hope he won’t be an alcoholic like Grandpa Arthur,’ ‘A homosexual like Uncle Peter,’ ‘Lazy and womanizing like our paternal grandfather.’ Some parents dread the crisis of adolescence: ‘We hope he’ll find a decent woman,’ ‘When I think that my daughter will belong to another man . . .’ On the affective plane, every child is compared to his or her family, and since this is a mechanism that
tends to reproduce itself, the parents’ fears act in the background as curses.”

  Georg Groddeck in The Book of the It writes, “Fear is the result derived from the repression of a desire,” and “Fear is desire: those who fear rape, desire it.” During childhood it is through the psyches of our parents that the family injects its desires into our minds in the form of fears. Arrows that were shot many generations ago arrive to strike us, demanding that we fulfill their self-destructive impulses: “You have to develop the same cancer that your grandfather had,” “You have to lose your ovaries like so many of your ancestors did,” “Alcoholism is a family tradition,” “The son of the tiger must be born with stripes,” “If the mother’s a whore, the daughter’s a whore.” Unless they can be fulfilled metaphorically through an act of psychomagic, these family curses will obsess us for our whole lives.

  A psychoanalyst could not shake off the fear of losing her patients and ending up on the street, homeless, a beggar. I advised her to disguise herself as an indigent (dirty and worn out clothes, hair encrusted with dirt, red nose) and receive clients thus in her office. She must also have a liter of wine by her side and a few crusts of hard bread.

  “And what am I going to tell them?”

  “Tell them you’re doing an act of psychomagic.”

  “And for how long do I have to present myself like this?”

  “You’re thirty years old. You will be a psychoanalyst-beggar for thirty days.”

  A wife was obsessed with the desire to have many lovers, but due to a high appreciation of fidelity, she contained herself. I suggested that she trick her husband by remaining faithful to him.

  “That’s what I want, but it’s impossible!”

  “It is possible, metaphorically. First of all, you should confess these desires to your husband and convince him to collaborate with you. He will rent a hotel room. Then he will call you, imitating someone else’s voice, and tell you to come there for a rendezvous. When you arrive at the room, he will be waiting there disguised as someone else, with a false mustache, beard, or wig, and acting with gestures he never uses. Without saying a word, you two should make love. Then he will leave. You will go back home, where your husband, having restored his own personality, will be waiting for you. He will ask you, ‘Where were you?’ And you’ll answer with a lie: ‘I was at the dentist’s.’ This act should be repeated several times, each time disguising your husband as a different person.”

  The family incessantly makes predictions about us: “If you do not study, you will fail in life,” “You don’t have a good ear; don’t sing,” “You are insufferable; no man will want to marry you,” “If you keep on like this, you’ll end up in jail.” The subconscious tends to fulfill the prediction. Anne A. Schutzberger, a professor at the University of Nice, mentions one aspect of this phenomenon: “If one carefully examines the past of a number of patients seriously ill with cancer, one will find that in many cases, they are people who unconsciously developed a ‘life script’ during their childhood, sometimes even with the date, time, day, or age at which they will die, and then they find themselves actually in this situation of dying. For example, at age thirty-three—the age at which Jesus Christ died—or forty-five—the age at which a father or mother died, and so on. These are all examples of a kind of automatic fulfillment of personal or family predictions.”

  It has been proven that if a teacher expects a bad student to remain the same, it is most likely that nothing will change, while on the contrary, if the teacher believes that the child is intelligent but shy and predicts that despite this he or she will make progress, the child begins to study well.

  The only way to free oneself from an obsessive prediction is to fulfill it, not to try to forget it. A Spanish friend of mine, a skeptic who always made fun of clairvoyants, had me read the Tarot for her out of curiosity. The cards told her, “Someone very close to you will die, and it will cost you a lot of money.” From that moment on, she never ceased to be distressed. The more she tried not to believe the prediction, the greater her obsession grew. I recommended, “Close the doors and windows of your home. Pump insecticides into all the rooms. Watch a fly die. Then it will be true that ‘someone very close to you will die.’ Then take a dollar bill and add six zeros to it in indelible ink. Wrap the fly in it and bury it. Thus it will have ‘cost you a lot of money.’” She did it. Her obsession vanished instantly.

  A French woman with an exceptional voice who had been told by her father, “You’re a dreamer; you’ll never earn a living with your throat unless you sing at the opera house,” felt obliged to take singing lessons but never went on from being a student to being a professional. Her impossible goal was to sing at the opera. Knowing she was unable to achieve this, she felt like a failure. I offered to fulfill her father’s demands. She was to dress humbly, go to the Palace of the Opera at six o’clock in the evening, and start singing next to the gates with a bowl at her feet. Seven friends, one after another, would deposit a bill in the bowl. After the song, they should applaud her. With the money she received, she should buy an article of clothing that emphasized her beauty. Once the paternal requirement of singing at the opera house was fulfilled, her feelings of inferiority disappeared, and very soon after she became successful at singing the popular songs of which she was fond.

  In Mexico City, I met with a young man who was afraid of committing suicide. This fear had been instilled by his mother who, when angry with him, had always yelled, “You’re going to end up like your father!” He had been told that his father was a bad man who ended up committing suicide with pills. I asked him what color he imagined these barbiturates to be. He said they were blue.

  “Where did he die?”

  “In a hotel in Buenos Aires, in Argentina.”

  “Look in the city for a street named after Buenos Aires or Argentina. Rent a hotel room there, or as close to it as you can. Warn your mother that you are going to perform a therapeutic act that is necessary to prevent you from committing suicide and that you need her help. Go to the hotel room carrying a small bottle of blue sugar pills. Swallow all of them and lie in bed, completely still. An hour later, your mother should arrive and find you like that, ‘dead.’ She should cry, embracing your ‘corpse,’ uttering great lamentations and asking for forgiveness. Then she should call four assistants, who will carry you, very stiff, out of the hotel room. They will carry you, stretched out in a van, to the apartment where you live with your girlfriend. They will deposit you at her feet. She will embrace you, kiss you, caress you. Then you will wake up. You will tell your mother, ‘I have committed suicide like my father! Now that the prediction is fulfilled I will live my own life.’ To celebrate, you will invite your girlfriend, your mother, and the four friends to dine on tacos made from blue tortillas.”

  A clairvoyant had predicted to a very fat, childlike man that on his next birthday he would have a serious accident. The fateful date was approaching, and he was so preoccupied that he could barely get up in the morning to go to work. I recommended that he buy one of those calendars from which one tears off a page for each day. The next day, in the early morning, he should tear off the pages until he got to the date of his birthday. Then he should go to a bakery dressed like a child and buy a multitiered cake covered in cream. He should carry it away unwrapped, walking down the street. He should purposely stumble and fall face down onto the cake, burying his face in the cream. He should scream like a child who believes he has had a major accident. Then he should go to the seer’s house with the crushed cake and smear it on him.

  A woman was obsessed because a doctor had told her it was likely that she would have ovarian cancer. She felt sterile. To eliminate this negative prediction, I advised her to insert two fresh dove eggs into her vagina and keep them there for one whole night in order that they might confer their germinative strength. Then she should bury them in fertile soil, planting two large flowers there to symbolize her fulfilled ovaries.

  A young woman was worried because a
ll the women in her family tree were only children and had been widowed. She wanted to find a husband who would not die. I advised her to fulfill the prediction, since she was not currently living with a partner, by dressing in black and having business cards printed with her name on them, followed by “widow of X.” She should also make a human-sized doll representing the dead husband with her own hands, with which she would sleep for seven nights. After that time she should bury it and plant a tree over the “grave.”

  In order to solve a problem I often make the client aware that, as in dreams, he or she is shifting the image of one person onto another. One woman could not break free from her former husband. Although she hated him, the separation made her suffer. I advised her to obtain a picture of her father’s face and a picture of her ex-husband’s face. The pictures should be large, life size, on transparent sheets. Then she should place the ex-husband’s face over that of the father and tape them to the glass of her bedroom window, preferably where the rising sun shines in, in order to see both images at the same time, superimposed. “Go to visit your father, and without him knowing it, dig in his laundry basket and steal a pair of underpants. Back at your house, cut a piece off the fly and stick it at the bottom of the double picture. When you truly realize that you are suffering not from your ex-husband’s lack of understanding but from your father’s, due to a repressed incestuous desire from childhood, you can burn the two transparencies and the piece of underwear, dissolve some of the ashes in a glass of wine, and drink it. Then you will accept the divorce with pleasure, knowing that it is a liberation.”