A great Italian theater and film actor came to consult me, accompanied by his wife. He had suffered depression in a cyclical form for many years. He was a handsome old man, very tall, robust, with an impressive voice. However, despite his radiant personality, I realized that in his heart he was still a docile child. His wife, a small brunette with a tremendous personality, exercised a virile authority over him. Exploring the actor’s family tree, I saw that his mother, due to the absence of the father, had developed an extremely possessive character, making him into her faithful servant. The famous man did not like acting at all; it was not his vocation. However, wanting to please his mother, who insisted that he must succeed on the stage and screen, he had dedicated most of his life to this. And, of course, becoming an internationally renowned star, racking up one triumph after another without taking any pleasure in it because this was the maternal ideal and not his own, he suffered from one depression after another. He felt that he was not himself, but an individual living a foreign destiny. His wife, who admired him greatly, was in a way a copy of his mother, now deceased. I proposed a psycho-magical act: the obedient child should rebel against both his mother and his wife. To assert his independence, he should go to visit his mother’s grave, carrying a rooster. Standing on the slab, he should slit the animal’s throat, let the blood fall on his penis and testicles, and with his crotch thus bloodied, he should return home and have intercourse with his wife, without any prior foreplay, with intense movements, while shouting to release his anger, which up until then had been repressed.
The man was not surprised or frightened. He simply said, “I’m sorry, Alejandro, I cannot do that. I’m . . .” (He pronounced his famous name with emphasis and a touch of desperation). “If I were an unknown person, I would probably do it.”
How could I explain what he at all costs did not want to see? If his mother had made him into this famous person against his will it was because she had never loved him; she had only loved herself, or perhaps her own father. The act that would have overthrown his dependency, and perhaps would have prolonged his life (he died a couple of years after this consultation), could not be carried out because he was a prisoner of an image of himself, all the more painful because he knew it was false, but yet respected it, as a turtle respects its shell, because it had completely replaced his essence. Without it he would have felt empty, nonexistent. This defensive system caused any attempt at real healing to fail.
The human brain reacts like an animal, defending its territory, which it identifies with its life. The brain delineates this space with its urine and feces. Parents, siblings, spouses, co-workers, and above all, the body are all part of this space. The one who is in charge has limitations that correspond to his or her level of consciousness. The higher the level of consciousness, the greater the freedom, but to reach this level—where the territory is not just a few square meters or a small group of people, but the entire planet and all of humanity, and indeed the entire universe and all living beings—it is first necessary to heal the wound and get rid of the fetal conditioning, then the family conditioning, and finally the social conditioning. In order to reach this mutation in which he abandons the orders he has been given and lives in gratitude for the miracle of being alive, the client must be made aware of his defensive mechanisms. These are mechanisms that all animals use to escape their predatory enemies. They know how to shut themselves off and how to play dead. They roll up, they cover themselves with chitinous shells, they bury themselves in the mud, and they shut down their breathing and heartbeat. The human being does the same thing: she becomes paralyzed, encloses herself in a repetitive system of gestures, desires, emotions, and thoughts, and vegetates within these narrow limits, rejecting all new information, mired in an endless repetition of the past. To avoid sinking into the depths, she lives floating in a net of superficial sensations, anesthetized most of the time. Animals know how to camouflage themselves, to make themselves similar to the environment in which they live. The chameleon changes color, some insects look like tree leaves, and certain mammals have skin that resembles the terrain that they inhabit. Likewise, a great many human beings, discarding their natural uniqueness, make themselves the same as the world that surrounds them. They forbid themselves the slightest trace of originality, they eat what everyone else eats, they dress according to the latest fad, they speak with accents and idioms that indicate that they indubitably belong to some social group, and they form part of the masses that march along all brandishing the same red book, making the same salute with an outstretched arm, or wearing the same uniform. They depend entirely on appearances, relegating their true being to the darkness of their dreams. When animals feel attacked, they can fight back. The fear of knowing oneself, coupled with the fear of being deprived of what one believes oneself to possess, including one’s way of life—which would involve a painful encounter with the essential wound—can turn humans into murderers. In other animal species, before attack the primary defense is flight. According to the ancient Chinese treatise the Thirty-Six Stratagems, “Flight is supreme politics. To keep one’s forces intact, avoiding confrontation, is not defeat.” These people do not want to know anything of themselves, they abandon treatment halfway through, they constantly justify themselves, they struggle to always be right and to prove that others are wrong, they succumb to vices, and they develop infatuations and obsessions; sometimes, they move to a foreign country in order to not confront their problems, using distance as a painkiller. Flight is sometimes accompanied by self- mutilation: the lizard escapes by detaching its tail. My friend G. K., a great French science-fiction writer, was disappointed in love at the height of his literary success: the woman of his dreams married somebody else. G. K. decided to stop writing forever. In a metaphorical sense, he was castrated. Van Gogh cut off his ear. Rimbaud expelled poetry from his life. Some people turn away from their loved ones or their favorite things, others mutilate themselves through cosmetic surgery, squandering their fortunes . . .
In a consultation, the defenses begin as soon as the Tarot reading starts. “I already knew that.” In saying this, the client believes he is denying importance to something that he knows but keeps in his subconscious regions. As soon as the reading is over, the client forgets what he saw clearly, in the same way that we forget our dreams when we wake up in the morning. Sometimes, although he speaks clearly and distinctly, he seems not to hear; this is psychological deafness. If he is shown a painful point in the structure of his family tree, he will appear not to see it; this is psychological blindness. If you propose an act, he will haggle as much as he can. Sometimes it seems too difficult, sometimes too long, too expensive, or he will ask to change the details or be afraid of the others’ reactions: “If I do this my father might die, my mother will go mad.” Once he does decide to carry out the psychomagical act, he will put it off. He might wait for years. Or he may declare that during the time of waiting, he has been cured: he no longer needs a solution because there is no problem! Suddenly, a word offends him or a revelation brings on an attack of vomiting, crying, or shaking, requiring the therapist to calm him, thus diverting the therapy from its objective. If asked to provide useful information, he will start telling interminable anecdotes, or will speak much faster than usual, as if fleeing from his own words, or else will lie, or will be stubbornly silent about important memories, or will appear to be collaborating but will make mistakes with dates and names. Finally, trying by all means possible to be the therapist’s friend, he will fall in love with the latter, making sexual advances, offering gifts, invitations to dinner, and will end up disappointed, feeling betrayed, and speaking ill of the therapy.
Ejo Takata said, “For a chicken to be born, the hen should peck at the eggshell from the outside, while the chick pecks at it from within.” However, in many cases, however well-intentioned the client may be, his unconscious defenses are so great that he cannot collaborate on his healing. No word, no advice, can break through the barriers of his false identity, n
o attempt at bringing awareness can separate him from his childlike point of view, and his negative feelings dominate him, driving him away from the path that could lead to self-discovery. When this happens, in order to release the client from his problems, we must treat him as a patient.
For the primitive healer death is always a disease, an injury, caused by envy of others. The patient is invaded by a foreign entity, and instead of being cured she must be liberated, expelling what has been sent from her soul and body. To this end, as we have seen, the charlatans of the city turn to cleansing rituals or the imitation of surgery. In these cases of powerlessness (in which the person creates a tumor, a persistent physical pain, a paralysis, or a depression in order to avoid confronting the cause of her suffering, which might be a family secret, incest, social shame, embarrassing diseases, etc.), no success will be achieved through oral language, analysis, the recommendation of an act, or the gaining of awareness. The only possibility for relief is to eliminate the symptom. However, most of the symptoms are manifested by the body, which is the dumping ground for unresolved problems, so the therapist comes in to expel the problems, treating the patient as “possessed.” In the Gospels, we are told that the first thing Jesus Christ did after spending forty days fasting in the desert was to enter a temple and with loud cries expel the demons from a possessed person . . .
A machi with a branch of cinnamon, a sacred tree for the Mapuche.
Photo: George Munro.
On my trip to Temuco, a city in Chile a thousand kilometers from the capital, I had the opportunity to accompany a kind ethnologist on the muddy roads that wind through the mountains. We traveled in a powerful Jeep loaded with “needs”—commodities that these poor people lack such as coffee, fruits, soft drinks, flour, cookies, and so forth—that would allow us to be well received by a Mapuche healer. In a tiny valley between three peaks we found a modest hut surrounded by a garden with small trees and medicinal plants, where pigs, chickens, three dogs, and four children roamed about. Very near the door was a rehue, a sacred altar about two meters tall made from the trunk of a tree, with seven steps cut into it and surrounded by cinnamon sticks. In a manner of speaking, the rehue is a vertical altar on which the machi stands. Using it as a base, the machi utters her incantations in a language that comes from the depths of time. Thanks to the shipment of “needs,” we were kindly received. The woman, who was pregnant, wore a simple skirt and sweater vest. Over these humble clothes she wore a long silver necklace and spiked silver bracelets on her wrists. Despite her wrinkled face, she was no more than thirty years old.
The ethnologist had told me that this woman, married very young to a man who was a heavy drinker, had dreamed one night that a white serpent came to her and gave her the power to heal. She woke up distraught, feeling ignorant, too burdened by the weight of her husband and children to deal with the ills of so many people. But her body started to become paralyzed, and she found it more and more difficult to breathe, until she was at the point of dying in atrocious pain. The white serpent came to her in a dream again, and this time she told it that she would agree to be a machi. The snake immediately gave her the power to recognize the healing value of plants and taught her to heal using ancestral rites. She awoke speaking the mysterious language of the machis, and the first thing she did was to cure her husband of his vices and make him her assistant.
She allowed us to attend a healing session in a small, very clean room decorated with fabrics woven in geometric patterns and a photo of her with her husband, their children, and their dogs. She received a sick man covered with a wool blanket who was carried in the arms of his wife and his mother. He was pale, with fever and pain in his stomach and liver, and his legs were so weak that he was unable to walk.
“An envious man, we’ll soon see who, has paid a sorcerer to send you this ill. I will chase it off of you,” the machi said to him as she laid him down on his back on a small rectangular table, with his feet flat on the dirt floor on each side. She struck the kultrung, a small drum with cosmic significance, and while hitting it began an incantation to each of the four cardinal points. Then, apparently in a trance, she flogged the air around the sick man with a handful of herbs, as if banishing invisible entities. “Evil spirits, leave this place! Leave this poor man alone!” Then, in a resounding voice she said, “Bring me the white hen!” Her husband, a broad-chested, short-legged man, his face embellished by respectful love, brought her the bird. The healer tied its legs and folded its wings so that it could not flutter or escape. She put the hen on the patient’s chest. “Look well, poor man. The life you see in those eyes is your life. The heart that beats is your heart. Those lungs that breathe are your lungs. Do not blink; do not stop looking at her.” She struck the drum rhythmically, crying with surprising authority, “Get out, bad bile! Get out, devil fever! Get out, stomach pain! Set free this good man, this brave man, this handsome man.” Then, gently, she took the white hen and showed it to the sick man and his family, who trembled in surprise. The hen was dead!
“The evil in your husband, your son, passed into this hen. She died so that you might live. You are healed. Go to the yard, gather dry wood, and burn her.”
Seeing that his illness had passed to the hen, the sick man’s imagination allowed him to believe that he was healthy. His fever and pains vanished. He got up without any help, went smiling out to the garden, gathered dry twigs, skillfully lit a fire, and burned the bird. For my part, I imagined several ways in which the machi could have managed to kill the bird surreptitiously. Perhaps she thrust one of the spikes on her bracelet into its neck, pressed on a nerve center, or, in complicity with her husband, poisoned it beforehand. What did it matter? The point was that she was able to affect the patient’s mind, making him believe that his illness had been removed. Are all diseases a manifestation of the imagination, a kind of organic dream?
Some time later in a course that I taught to doctors and therapists in Sanary, in the south of France, I applied this primitive concept to the removal of evil from the body, coming closer to what I call “psycho-shamanism,” taking a few minutes to cure a woman of a tic that she had had for forty years. Constantly, every two or three seconds, in a broken rhythm, she would shake her head from side to side. I called her up in front of a hundred students and proceeded to interrogate her, using a friendly voice that instantly made me a paternal archetype for her. Applying Pachita’s technique, despite her forty-eight years, I spoke to her like a child. “Tell me, little girl, how old are you?” She fell into a trance and replied in a childlike voice, “Eight years old.”
“Tell me, little one, who are you saying no to all the time with your head?”
“The priest!”
“What did this priest do to you?”
“When I went to confess to prepare for my first communion, he asked me if had sinned mortally. Since I did not know what a mortal sin was, I said no. He insisted, asking me if I had touched myself between my legs. I had done it without knowing it was wrong. It gave me great shame, and I lied with a resounding ‘No.’ He kept on insisting, and I kept denying it. I left there and received the sacred host feeling that I was a liar, in a state of mortal sin, condemned forever.”
“My poor child, you have kept on denying for forty years. You have to understand that this priest was sick, that you did not have to feel guilty: it is normal for children to investigate their bodies and touch themselves; the sex organs are not the seat of evil. I will remove the useless ‘No!’ from your head . . .”
I had the woman write “NO!” on masking tape with a black marker and stuck it to her forehead. I asked her to lie on her back on a table and shook my outstretched hands all around her body as if severing invisible bonds, shouting, “Go away, you stupid priest; leave this innocent child alone! Out! Out!” Then, acting as if it was a great effort, I began to tear the tape with the “NO!” off her forehead. I pretended that it was very difficult. I exclaimed, “It has deep roots! Push! Push it out! Help me, girl!” She began to p
ush, screaming in pain. Finally, I triumphantly pulled off the masking tape. She covered her face with her hands and burst into tears. When she raised her head, she no longer had the tic. I told her to go out to the garden and burn the “NO!” I told her to take some of the ashes, dissolve them in honey, and swallow it. She did. Her head shaking never returned.
The Dance of Reality: A Psychomagical Autobiography Page 38
