MAGIK - THE OVERLOOKED SIDE OF THERAPY

  

 

 

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.