The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography (44 page)

Some women asked me for a psychomagical act that would enable them to find a man. To those appearing to be shut away in themselves, who were timid and unable to express anger against their fathers, I advised going to a specialized school for shooting lessons, not only with pistols and rifles but also with machine guns. I received a letter from one client effusively thanking me for my advice, who told me she was now in a relationship with her instructor. Later she came to me asking for a psychomagical act that would allow her to break free of this man.

Abortions made necessary by emotional or economic problems cause deep trauma. The woman, feeling guilty, becomes depressed and cannot come to terms with it. There may be a crisis in the couple’s relationship as they move further and further away from each other. To help my clients in these cases, I suggested that they think of a fruit to identify with the fetus—some chose a raspberry, some a mango, others a small tangerine. Having chosen a fruit, the woman should place it on her bare belly and fasten it there with four strips of flesh-colored bandage. A friend, the husband, the lover, or a family member should dress as a surgeon, cut the bandages and take the fruit out, acting as if pulling it out with great difficulty. During this action, the consultant should relive the feelings she experienced during the operation and express them aloud. Then the “fetus” should be placed in a small hardwood box, and she and the man who inseminated her (or her current partner, a friend, or a family member) should go to a beautiful place, dig a hole with their hands, bury the “coffin” there, and plant a sapling on top of it. Once this is done, the man should kiss her on the lips, slipping a honey candy into her mouth.

When people consult me who have pimples on their faces and I see that they have had a lack of attention from their parents, I advise them to get their mother and father to spit into a green clay pot that they hold in their right hand. Then, with the middle and ring fingers of the left, they should stir the clay and saliva to form a paste that is then applied to the pimples or eczema.

In extreme cases where the child abuse has been so cruel that the damage seems incurable, I advise the client to die . . . and then be reborn as someone else. I advise him to choose a beautiful place; dig his grave there aided by a group of friends; read his funeral rites facing the grave; then lie down, naked and wrapped in a sheet. His friends will cover him with dirt (of course leaving his mouth and nose exposed), and he will stay there, mimicking the emptiness of death, for at least forty minutes. When he says he is ready his friends will disinter him, wash him, put new clothes on him, and baptize him with a new name.

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.”