Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

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.