From: Saturn's Lady
MAGIK AND CREATIVITY
– THE HEALING EFFECT
Magik and Creativity are the most fundamental outcomes of
psychotherapy and especially Gestalt Therapy. However, in the recent
contemporary fields of healing, we note a trend toward the so called
“scientific outcomes” of psychotherapy. Therefore, creativity and magik, (magic
not of the rabbit out of a hat type) that is the soul of healing, is often
overlooked and replaced with a pseudo-scientific jargon.
For example: cognitive (CBT) therapies focus mainly (or
exclusively) on the intellect and avoid the inner ‘soul’ aspects in human
encounters because they are not “evidence based’.
Another example: I read that at the recent gestalt conference in Italy,
both, the European Association Gestalt Therapy and the American Association for the Advancement of Gestalt Therapy,
spent a lot of time debating the use of neurobiology and neuropsychology. They
seem to feel that the brain is the focus where the scans can identify locations
on the brain as the process of healing takes place. The whole system is cut up into pieces with no integration of Body, Mind & Soul.
So, many gestalt therapists as well, as they practice psychotherapy, have a tendency to
ignore or forget (avoid) the magic moments that happen during a therapy
session. They focus, instead on “problems to be resolved” and “dysfunctions”.
Yet, those magical moments frequently provide the solutions to the identified
problems.
To make this idea of 'magical moments' more concrete, I will
come back to the master Magician, Tarologist, and therapist-artist, Alejandro
Jodorowsky. (You may re-read his story in the previous post). Jodorowsky or
"Jodo" in short, has documented hundreds of psycho-magic interventions in his practice that do
work. Here is a sample of his magic moments:
Psychomagic Consultations: What Lies
Hidden in the Darkness of the Unconscious?
By A. Jodorowsky
The psychomagic advice can be
applied to any problem suffered as indicated in the consultation title;
however, it is necessary to adapt the actions, with some changes, to the
character of each individual and to the configurations of each person’s
genealogy tree. Whoever wishes to delve into these techniques with the purpose
of prescribing acts to others or to him- or herself, I present here some of the
numerous consultations I did in 2007 and in the café in Paris where I read the
Tarot every Wednesday. During my five-hour consulting sessions, each meeting
with each of the thirty-plus people I saw, lasted no more than eight minutes.
The Tarot, used as a psychological test, combined with a definite intuitive
evolution acquired thanks to more than thirty years of study, allows me to go,
without any force, directly to the consultant’s essential problem, gently finding a
door in the consultant’s defensive wall. Generally, whoever suffers does not wish
to know why he or she suffers but only wants to get rid of his or her painful
symptoms. Illnesses and psychological suffering are essentially caused by a
lack of consciousness. The cause of injury is so painful that it is hidden in
the darkness of the unconscious. In combat, warriors strenuously fight to kill
the enemy. In a Tarot session, one fights strenuously to return the other to
life. At the beginning of my readings, sometimes this combat is made by using a
lot of violence. I tell of this attitude, which I learned from my Zen
meditation teacher, Ejo Takata (1928– 1997), in my book "El Maestro y Las Magas"(Spanish edition).
When I learned that it is one thing to give and another to force someone to
receive. I then began to move forward on a sweet and compassionate path. I
eliminated from my heart all types of discrimination; I expelled from my soul
the unforgiving judge who wielded a morality based on poorly translated and
poorly interpreted religious texts. For the duration of these consultations, I
forgot myself and concentrated totally on the person in front of me. I opened
my mind, motivated only by the desire to be useful and to offer a loving ear,
to accept any rejection with kindness, seeing it as an important part of the
healing process. Psychomagic is not a scientific discipline; it is an artistic
creation of theatrical origin, which tends to awaken the creativity in the
consultant, turning the consultant into his or her own healer. This long-time
activity was useful for me, too. Naturally, little by little, I was opening the
gate that was between my intellect and my unconscious. Barely revealing the
source of the problem, without the least effort, I reach the psychomagic act.
An If you, the reader, can
identify with the consultant’s problem, and the act I propose resonates with
you, you can do it, adapting it to your own reality. If, for example, I speak
of visiting a grave, the loved one could be in a burial place or may have been
cremated: it doesn’t change the act, whether it is carried out at a grave site
or where the ashes were scattered. Sometimes something very difficult is asked.
How does one ask an adult to find a woman who is nursing who will let him
nurse? Although the consultant often rejects this act, one must insist. If a
person is persistent and has faith, everything he seeks comes to him. Modifying
the proverb “If the mountain doesn’t come to you, then go to the mountain,” we
must say, with fervour, “I am not going to the mountain, but I wish with all of
my soul that the mountain will come to me.” The psychologist Jacques Lacan
(1901– 1981), during a class, told his students, “In a moment of creative
ecstasy, first talk and then think.” The messages from the unconscious have the
spontaneity of dreams. They are not created by the intellect. The person prescribing
a psychomagic act first receives it from the unconscious then recommends it,
just as it is dictated by the unconscious. Explications, products of the
rational mind, clarify some aspects of the act but do not exhaust its mystery.
PSYCHOMAGIC ACTIONS AND OUTCOMES
In all of the
examples presented here, the consultants who fulfilled the psychomagic acts
obtained the hoped-for result. They were healed by acting on the messages from the unconscious.
1. A woman has bad relations with men. Her conflict
originates in the negative image that her mother gave her.
I recommended that
she dress completely in her mother’s clothes and then talk to her lover as if
she were her mother, repeating all the negative concepts she received in her
childhood. I told her to let the words of hate, which her mother inoculated in
her, arise in her mouth. After she insults her partner, she tears these clothes
to pieces while screaming, “I am not her! I am capable of loving you!” She then
sends the rags, smeared in honey, in a gift box to her mother.
2. A young woman gets extremely nervous when she drives a
car and, because of this, she is forced to drive only rarely.
I recommended
driving, dressed as a little girl, accompanied by her parents. Her mother
should have a packet of candies and put one in her mouth every five minutes
while her father, also every five minutes, should whisper in her ear, “Women
drive better than men.”
3. A childless woman, who forgot the first eight years of
her childhood, is afraid she has developed uterine cancer. She was born after
her mother aborted the previous pregnancy at three months. The consultant’s
father abandoned the home when the consultant’s mother was three months
pregnant with her. She explains that her birth was not desired. Lacking individuality,
she identified with her mother, and she feels possessed by the sacrificed foetus,
which she feels has materialized into cancer.
I recommended that she fill a red
bag with candies and go distribute them to the children in an orphanage. She
then carries the bag for seven days with a kitchen knife painted black in it,
and then hides it, after seven days, somewhere in her mother’s house without
telling her. The red bag represents her desires to live; the black knife, the
mother’s wishes to abort her as she did with her brother. The guilt over having
disobeyed by being born makes her create cancer, a tumour that represents when
she was in the foetal state. All of this is returned to the parent.
4. A woman asks why she creates obstacles all the time.
Through the Tarot, I explain to her that she reproduces the obstacles that her
father put in her way. These difficulties, in the absence of affection (he
wanted a boy not a girl), were the only thing that united her to him. The
consultant confirmed the reading, revealing that she still keeps the father’s
ashes in an urn.
I recommended that she dress as a man and go to a rugby game
(a sport her father loved and to which he never wanted to take her), carrying
the urn. She should watch the whole game and, at the end, empty the father’s
ashes in the seat in which she was sitting. Then she should bury the man’s suit
and plant an orchid over it.
5. A blind man cannot
stand that his mother treats him like a handicapped child. He wants me to give
him a psychomagic act to help him express his huge rage.
I recommended that he
stand in front of his mother with a bull’s eye in each hand, screaming, “Look!”
then he should throw the eyes at her and scream, “Eat them!” Then, putting a
rock album on at high volume, he should undress and say, between laughter, “Now
do you see! I am a man!”
6. A young woman can’t manage to have an orgasm with her
lover. In general, she is afraid of men. Her father was assassinated by the mafia
in Palermo.
I recommended that she enrol in a shooting club, then buy a pistol
with which her lover masturbates her until she reaches orgasm. Then she buries
the pistol with a photo of her father and a wedding ring.
7. An old man,
crying, solicits an act that will get him out of the depression from which he
has suffered for more than twenty years. He feels that his ex-wife, his
daughter (now older), and his mother abuse him because, although they
constantly ask him for money, they also won’t quit blaming him for ruining his
marriage.
I recommended that he invite his ex-wife, his daughter, and his
mother to dinner at his home. At the table, there will be three plates of black
metal, without covers. He will put on each plate a whole, roasted chicken. He
will take out a hammer and destroy the three chickens, screaming with
frightening fury, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Then he will present three
containers filled with earth, ordering them to bury the pieces of chicken. Then
he will give each one a flowering plant to plant in a pot. He will then tell
them, “Get out of here! From now on, when you want to have dinner with me, you
will have to pay the tab.”
8. A woman asks how
she can make her father quit depending on her. He makes her responsible for all
the dealings in the outside world while he waits for her at home, cleaning and
cooking. I explain that she is living not as a daughter but as a wife to her
father, a couple in which she has the role of the man and he has the role of
the woman.
I recommended that she tell her father that she is going to give him
a pair of handmade shoes and that, for these, he must take action: he has to
stand on a sheaf of paper and draw the contour of his feet with a pencil. She
gives these drawings to a master shoemaker so that he can concoct a pair of
women’s shoes with tall heels. Once finished, she brings the shoes to her
father saying, “I will continue to worry over you only if you use these shoes
here in the house and also when you go out shopping or visiting your friends.
If I am your man, you should assume the role of my wife.”
9. The consultant has
a problem with his father: he despises him for being dirty. He is ashamed to
tell his girlfriend that his father is a garbage man.
I recommended that he go
to the girlfriend dressed in his father’s dirty clothes with his face stained
with soot. He isn’t to speak as himself but as if he was his own father: “I
have come to tell you something in the name of my son because he dared not
confess it because he is ashamed of me. He didn’t want you to know that I am a
dirty garbage man. With pleasure I will quit this job, but I need it to pay for
his education. He loves you deeply. I should tell you he is a good boy,
studious, intelligent, and at the base, he loves me as much as I love him. To
end this problem, could you do me the favour of washing me?” Then he asks the
girlfriend to undress him and wash him. Then, dressed in his own clothes (that
he brought in a package), he will go with her to introduce her to his father.
10. The consultant is an osteopath interested in shamanism.
His mother had cancer in the right knee. He believes this trouble has a
psychological origin. At the death of her husband, she, clad in her widowhood
because men have disappointed her, allows only her son to visit her. She
doesn’t want to see any doctors. She demands that he cure her. He doesn’t know
how to.
I recommended that he make a placebo surgery. He should buy a squid and
then go visit his mother. He should then draw the curtains closed to prevent
the light from entering and, with the house totally dark, light some candles
and a lot of incense. He places his mother’s knee over a pillow, washes the
knee with blessed water, compresses the squid forcefully against the cancer for
at least ten minutes, and tells her, “This is your cancer; I am going to remove
it.” The consultant takes a bladeless knife and mimics removing the
squid-cancer with great difficulty. With his performance, he should convince
his mother, and in this way, she will believe that he struggles mightily to
remove her cancer. After an intense struggle, he rips out the squid-cancer. Then,
lighting it with candles, he goes to the bathroom, accompanied by his mother,
and shows her as he throws the “cancer” into the toilet bowl. She should flush
the toilet. He gives her a very nice perfume so that each day she can spray
perfume on her knee.
11. A consultant, a native of Barcelona and the daughter of
very Catholic parents, suffers from a very solid fear of being assassinated.
Through the Tarot, I explain to her that this fear is not of being murdered by
some unknown but by herself because of her sexual desires. Her parents raised
her for the order of nuns, hoping for an intact hymen.
12. A fifty-year-old woman has a lot of difficulty asking
for what she needs emotionally, especially of her partner (to whom she has been
married for thirty years). Thanks to the Tarot, she remembers when she was
little that she was interned in the hospital with tuberculosis and no relative
visited her. She understands that this is the cause of the difficulty she has
expressing herself to her partner.
I recommended that she, for whatever false
motive, check herself into a private clinic early one morning. She waits, lying
down, for her visitors. She expresses the pain of feeling abandoned. Four hours
later, her husband arrives, bringing her flowers, chocolates, and a rag doll.
He kisses her and puts a candy in her mouth, undresses her, rubs the doll all
over her body, and then makes love to her. They then go from the clinic to a
bar to get drunk and celebrate.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Manual of Psychomagic: The Practice
of Shamanic Psychotherapy. Inner Traditions/Bear & Company. Kindle
Edition.
