Alejandro Jodorowsky: Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

One day, with a friend of a friend, we went to a fine restaurant. We were both dressed very elegantly and ordered steak au poivre. Once served, we rubbed the meat all over our bodies, staining our clothing. When we had finished, we again ordered the same and repeated the act. We did it five or six times back to back until the whole restaurant was seized by panic. A year later, we returned to the same establishment, but the maître d’ proclaimed: “If you are thinking to repeat what you did the other day, no way! I will not permit you to enter this restaurant.” The act had made such an impact that time found itself stopped. It had happened a year earlier, but for him it was as if it had happened a week ago.

Your words remind me of an episode when I was fifteen or sixteen years old. I was absorbed in Dostoevsky and the impassioned Russians who passed from despondency to exaltation in an instant, inflamed with a cause, knocked to the ground; they fascinated me. One day I asked my friends: Why continue progressing? What would happen if the whole world decided to stop moving? Where would we go? And we decided to throw ourselves on the ground in the middle of the street and not move. The pedestrians walked over us; some made comments. If I’m not mistaken, this was a poetic act.

Of course! And I am sure that our readers, if they think about it, will remember similar moments of questioning consensus reality. We also lay down in front of a park bench, filthy and dressed in tatters, to remind people that an economic crisis is always possible, that misery can emerge at any moment. But remember, all of this happened in Chile, in a country subject to a form of collective insanity. Surely we could not have gone so far in another environment. The majority of the Chilean bureaucrats lived politely until six o’clock in the evening. Once out of the office, they got drunk and changed their personalities, almost changing their physical bodies. They abandoned their bureaucratic and social identities to assume their magical identities. The party was everywhere — the entire country was surrealist without knowing it.

Could only the Chilean temperament itself explain this atmosphere?

People who are thought to be reasonable, those who believe in the reality and the soundness of this world, do not plan crazy acts. But in Chile the earth trembles every six days! The country’s floor itself was, literally, convulsive. This meant that everyone always was subject to a tremor — either physical and existential. We do not inhabit a robust world ruled by a bourgeois order supposedly well ingrained, but we live in a trembling reality. Nothing remains fixed, everything trembles. ( Laughter. ) Everyone lived precariously, as much in the material plane as in the relational. No one ever knew how to end a party: the couple married at six o’clock in the afternoon could dissolve at six o’clock in the morning, the guests could throw the furniture out the window. . Naturally, anguish was at the heart of all this craziness. The country was poor, the social classes very differentiated.

Forty years have passed. In retrospect, how do you see these acts? Beyond being picturesque, what did they teach you?

Boldness, humor, an aptitude for questioning the postulated mediocrity of ordinary life, and a love for the free act. And what is the definition of the poetic act? It should be beautiful, aesthetic, and without any justification. It can also lead to some violence. The poetic act is a call to reality: One must face one’s own death, the unforeseen, our own shadow, the worms that swarm inside of us. This life that we want to be logical is really crazy, shocking, marvelous, and cruel. We claim our behavior is logical and consistent, but it is, in fact, irrational, crazy, contradictory. If we lucidly observe our reality, we would affirm that it is poetic, illogical, exuberant. In those times I was, without a doubt, immature, a young, harebrained, insolent kid; this does not deny that that particular period taught me to perceive the crazy creativity of existence and to not identify with the limits the majority of people enclose themselves in until they cannot bear it anymore and burst.

Poetry does not respect a preordained stereotype of the world.

No, poetry is convulsive! It’s bound up in the earth’s tremors! It denounces appearances; it pierces lies and conventions with its sword. I remember one day we went to the medical school and, with the help of a friend, stole an arm from a cadaver. We hid it in a coat sleeve and amused ourselves by shaking hands with people, touching them with the dead hand. No one dared remark that it was cold, without life, because they didn’t want to face the crude reality of this dead member. By telling you now, I realize that I am almost confessing. I know that all of this seems far-fetched. For us, it was certainly a game, but a profoundly dramatic game. The act created another reality in the same sense as ordinary reality. The act allowed us to access another level, and I am still convinced that with new acts we can open the door to another dimension.

So the act conceived in this manner does not have a purifying and therapeutic value?

Of course it does. If one thinks so. Our individual histories consist of words and acts. Most of the time people are content with small innocuous acts, until one day—“crack”—they lose control, they get furious, they break everything, hurl insults, they succumb to violence, sometimes committing a crime. . If a potential criminal were familiar with the poetic act, he could sublimate his homicidal expression by staging an equivalent act.

All the same, there is still an outrageousness, which is, without a doubt, dangerous.

That’s right. Society has put up barriers so that fear and its expression, violence, do not spring up at every moment. Which is why when one carries out an act different from ordinary and codified actions, it is important to perform it conscientiously, measuring and accepting the consequences beforehand. Carrying out an act is a conscious process that aims at voluntarily introducing a fissure into the dead order that permeates society; it is not the compulsive demonstration of a blind rebel. One should agree to not identify oneself with the poetic act, to not be driven by the energies that it releases. For example, Breton fell into a trap when he, taken by his enthusiasm, declared the poetic act could entail going out on the street armed with a revolver to open fire on people. He really regretted that later, even though he didn’t actually do it. His declaration in itself was an attack on society. The poetic act allows for expressing energies that are normally repressed or asleep inside us. The unconscious act is an open door to vandalism, to violence. When the crowds erupt into violence, when the demonstration deteriorates and the people begin to set cars on fire or throw rocks, it is also about a liberation of repressed energies. For this reason, acts of violence do not merit the title poetic act.

Were you and your friends conscious of this?

We ended up being so, after observing some dangerous acts perpetrated by hot-tempered individuals. These experiences shook us up and made us question ourselves seriously. A Japanese haiku provided a key for us. A student brought the master his poem, which stated:

A butterfly:

take away the wings

and it turns into a pepper!

The master’s response was immediate: “No, no; it is not like that. Let me correct your poem”:

A pepper:

add wings

and it turns into a butterfly!

The lesson here is clear: the poetic act must always be positive; it must be constructive and not destructive.