A. JODOROWSKY from Google images
PSYCHOMAGIC – THE NEW NAME FOR PSYCHOTHERAPY?
This blog has a very intriguing topic. In the last blog, you
were able to reflect on what is psychotherapy doing in the 21st century. It turns
out (as studies reveal) that it is mostly useless and it has grown into an
industry where the ‘per hour’ fee is god!
In July of this year, I and my family travelled to Canada.
Travelling from Brisbane to Vancouver was a very trying exercise. However, in
the 14 hours sitting, reading, watching movies I had a feeling that the long
trip was acceptable. This air plane time also gave me a “me time” – a time for
reflection and inner speculation about life.
One of the most interesting reflections and my awareness,
while, in Toronto, was the amazing speed of life among the people living there.
Everybody was rushing somewhere, no matter of their colour or background.
Everybody is busy moving somewhere and doing something. This made me think of
the “ZEN Reality” book I was reading. The author, Robert Powel, as early as 1975,
commented about how people have invented ways of improving and changing life’s
purpose by creating a rush of excitement that builds a ‘curtain’ behind which
is found the ‘ultimate end’ that makes improving on Nature a futile task. He
states:
“Facing the futility of constant ‘rush’ is not to face the
reality of death from which we try to run away all of our lives. Nor we do
realize that it is exactly this feverish drive for security that is causing the
insecurity and fears which constitute the underlying neurosis of modern man” (P.18,1975).
The reality is that most people in this world are seeking to
get out from their real or imagined troubles; maybe a slight relief from the
pressures of daily living and the usual stress of work and relationships, so
they will seize at anything that will give them some rest, some comfort.
Perhaps they may seek a way of inflating their ego or resolve issues about
their low self-esteem. Or a seek belief system that will ‘guarantee’ a
hereafter in a promised paradise. All these ways are an escape from reality and
a temporary comfort that does not resolve the unconscious conflicts that are
still there. Seeking comfort and the seeking of truth are not compatible.
Some individuals seek the comfort in psychotherapy and we
now have a huge industry in the developed world marketing self-help books,
retreats, workshops, courses on miracles and personal therapies. All available
for a price.
In my 35 years working as a gestalt therapist and trainer in
several countries and teaching at the University of Toronto, Canada and in
Queensland, I had a lot of opportunities to research and seek Wisdom by meeting
many Gurus and renowned teachers. One such wise man is Alejandro Jodorowsky.
Born in Chile, adopted Mexico in his early life and now residing in Paris,
France. His long and creative life is available in several books in Spanish,
French and English. Jodorowsky begun as an actor, then director, artist, master
in Tarot reading and finally creator of a very special therapy of his own
called PSYCHOMAGIC. And so begun his own brand of therapy and healing.
Jodorowsky’s premise is based on his long experience working
with people in many countries and cultures. The objective of Psychomagic is to
heal and resolve personal blocks that produce body, mind and spirit symptoms
that prevent us to lead a healthy and satisfying life. The key that opens the
‘doors’ of perception (and blocks) is the recognition that the unconscious
responds equally to symbolic acts as to actual experienced reality. The symbol
is the reality and therefore the appropriate symbolic ritual (therapy) can modify
and clear the consciousness traumas and introjected material accumulated over
the years and that stops us from growing and developing further as human
beings.
Jodorowsky also believes that many attitudes, character
traits and painful memories are set in our unconscious and need to be taken
back to at least four generations of the client’s family constellation. For
example, if your grandfather sat on the same chair all his life and used a
stick to punish you as a child, now every time you see that chair you will
explode into anger and resentments and you are not aware why you feel that way.
Then, if you are guided to break that chair into many pieces
and throw it out, you will feel very relieved and free of anger. Our
unconscious experiences this act of destruction as if you actually destroyed
your grandfather. Many healing rituals take that same pattern. Gestalt therapy developed
by Fritz Perls also uses similar strategies called ‘experiments’.
To understand the deep meanings of symbolic work,
Jodorowsky, (just as Jung), begun to study the symbolism of the TAROT cards and
wrote a comprehensive book on the subject. He memorized all the cards and did
readings for free in Paris. Soon he was asked by his clients to help them with
many personal problems and he started to ‘prescribe’ ritual tasks to enable the
symbol to emerge from the unconscious and heal the person or solve the problem.
“the spirit bird has to be liberated from the rational cage”
Thus, the whole experiment of Psychomagic was dedicated to
break the logical (cognitive) tradition of modern therapies and open up the
unconscious symbolic meanings that enable the client to heal. We seem to
believe that we are better than any electronic or artificial intelligence
computer, but we are not aware that the average person is possessed and
enslaved not only by his possessions, but worse still by his thoughts and
emotions. We are ‘programmed’ by our parents, school, culture and religion.
This creates an automatic response to any life situation based on the
accumulated introjects.
Jodorowsky sees himself as the servant of truth. He not only
developed an effective therapy that he named “Psychomagic”, but also he created
the ‘Panic Theatre’, a kind of group therapy as theatre and directed several films
like EL TOPO and the HOLY MOUNTAIN (see Amazon.com) and wrote many books on a
variety of topics. His critics described him as “El Loco” and he felt good to
be called a ‘wise madman’ for the wise fool is the zero card in the Tarot. The
start of something new.
As a wise master, Jodorowsky summarizes the concept of “know
thyself” as: “to know yourself signifies seeking the truth: that you are the
Universe, you do not have any limits (you are limitless) because we all are united
to the UNIVERSE like all organisms. Time is my life, what happens is my life!
If I know myself, then I am the actor and the spectator, what is the known and what
is the unknown, all at the same time. It is not just knowledge – it is pure
consciousness”.
THE GUIDE BOOK TO PSYCHOMAGIC
Having initiated the reader to the concept and idea of
Psychomagic, I am offering here the Introduction to the full text of the book
by Alejandro Jodorwosky. The book is available on Kindle books (Amazon.com).
Reflect on this short item and let me know your opinion.
He states: “Freeing the shackles of memory after having
studied and memorized the seventy-eight Arcana of the Tarot of Marseille, I
signed a contract with myself: “Once per week, in whatever popular café, I will
give free Tarot readings. This I will do until the end of my life.” I have been
completing this promise for more than thirty years. I turned the Tarot reading
into a kind of synthetic psychoanalysis that I call “tarology.” Essentially,
the goal of tarology is not to guess the future but rather, guided by the
Arcana, question the consultant about the past in order to help him or her
solve current problems. People of all ages, nationalities, and social,
economic, and consciousness levels come to the café where I read their Tarot.
There is no lack of those who ask for my advice (the background being a need
for permission to do what one dares not do) or for a divination (as positive as
possible). I must, therefore, frame each question. For example:
“Am I going to meet a man?” -
I cannot tell you if you are going to meet a man, but I can tell you why you
haven’t met one.
“Should I leave my
wife and children for a lover?” - I
cannot tell you if you should or should not do this or that thing, but I can
tell you the reasons that you have to continue living with your family and the
reasons that you have for going with the other. Weighing the advantages and
disadvantages of both, you must choose what most suits you.
All predictions and advice are takeover attempts designed by
the Tarot reader to convert the consultant into the “magician’s” subject. When
the consultant no longer considers the unconscious an enemy and loses the fear
of being him or herself, the consultant can uncover the trauma causing the
suffering. When this happens, he or she tends to ask for the solution.
“Okay, finally I know I am in love with my
mom, which impedes my forming a stable relationship. Now, what do I do?”
“Yearnings to give old men oral sex torment me because, when I was a
child, my grandfather put his penis in my mouth. How do I liberate myself from
this?”
Having confirmed to
myself that sublimating the undesirable urge either through an artistic
activity or through acts of social service does not eliminate repressed
desires, I invented Psychomagic.
Psychoanalysis is a technique that heals through words. The
consultant, who is called “the patient,” sits back in a chair or on the sofa.
The psychoanalyst is, at no time, allowed to touch the patient. To free the
patient from his or her painful symptoms, he or she is only asked to recall
dreams, take note of slips and accidents, separate from the language of the
will, and say, without breaks, whatever comes to mind. After a long time of
confusing monologues, the patient sometimes manages to revive a recollection,
buried in the depths of his or her memory. “They changed my nanny.” “My little
brother destroyed my dolls.” “They forced me to live with my smelly
grandparents.” “I surprised my father making love to a man,” and so on. The
psychoanalyst— who helps the patient progress by converting the messages sent
by the unconscious into a reasoned discourse— believes that, once the patient
discovers the cause of his or her symptoms, the patient can eliminate them.
But it does not end like this! When an unconscious urge
emerges, we can only be released by fulfilling the urge. Psychomagic proposes
that we act, not just talk. The consultant, following a path contrary to that
of psychotherapy, instead of teaching the unconscious to speak a rational
language, learns the language of the unconscious, which is composed not only of
words but also actions, images, sounds, smells, tastes, or tactile sensations.
The unconscious is capable of accepting symbolic or
metaphoric fulfilment: a photograph of someone can represent the actual person
or a part can represent the whole (such as witches casting a spell with hairs
of their potential victim). The unconscious projects, from memory, the person
onto another being or object. The creators of psychodrama realized that someone
who agrees to play the role of a relative can provoke deep reactions from a
consultant, as if the relative were standing there in person. Punching a
cushion produces relief from anger toward an abuser. But to achieve good
results, the person who punches the cushion must, in a way, free herself from
any morality imposed by the family, society, religions and culture. If the
consultant does this, she can, without fear of punishment, accept her (always
amoral) inner urges. For example, if someone wants to eliminate his little
sister, because she attracts the mother’s attention, and pins a photograph of
the little one onto a melon and busts the fruit apart with a hammer, his
unconscious assumes the crime is done. This way, the consultant feels
liberated.
It is understood in Psychomagic
work that those who populate the internal world (the memory) are not those who
populate the external world. Traditional magic and witchcraft work with the
exterior world, believing in the ability to acquire supernatural powers by way
of superstitious rituals in order to influence things, events, and beings.
Psychomagic works with the memory. Given the previously cited case, it is not
about eliminating the flesh-and-blood little sister (who is now an adult) but
about eliciting a change in memory— as much in the image of the hated one when
she was young as in the accumulated feelings of helplessness and rage in the
one who hates.
To change the world, it is necessary to begin by changing
ourselves. Images retained in the memory are accompanied by perceptions of
ourselves at the moment when we had the experiences. When we remember our
parents just as they acted during our childhoods, we do so from an infantile
point of view. We live accompanied or dominated by a group of egos at different
ages— all of them manifestations of the past. The goal of psycho-magic is to
convert the consultant into his or her own healer and to assure that the
consultant is placed within his or her adult ego: the ego that cannot occupy
any other place but the present.
I began to propose acts of Psychomagic to my Tarot
consultants. They were custom tailored, corresponding to each person’s
character or story. I wrote about some of these experiences in my books “Psychomagic”
and “The Dance of Reality”, which had a large impact. The requests for help
increased, so much so that I was not able to respond to them all. For those
with whom I had time to work, I requested that they, after fulfilling the act,
send me a card describing the results. Based on the acts that had a healing effect,
I then began to compile Psychomagic tips that could be used by a large number
of people.” In this way Jodorowsky is sharing his work and wisdom in a practical ‘manual’ that is now published
in English.
Jodorowsky,
Alejandro. Manual of Psychomagic: The Practice of Shamanic Psychotherapy .
Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle Edition.
