Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

On another occasion I was introduced to a young man with a stutter. His family tree revealed his father to be indifferent, selfish, childish, capricious, and unjust. The boy, not being loved by him, felt that he had no virile strength. I told him to take down his pants and sit on the edge of a chair. “I’m going to inject the energy of the Father. Breathe deeply.” Then, with my right hand, I took his testicles, and without squeezing but exerting a very solid contact, I made him feel that I was injecting an immense paternal strength. I imitated this injection with my lips narrowed, blowing out a long and intense jet of air. Without releasing him, I said with complete conviction, “You are cured. Breathe deeply, relax, think of your voice coming from your powerful testicles, and speak.” The young man spoke correctly. His stutter was gone.

With Cristóbal’s aid, I then began to perform more complex operations. Our years of theatrical practice were essential: the psychoshaman must use a voice that is never for an instant tinged with doubt or weakness. The feigned certainty must be total. To exorcise a “possessed” person, the cries must be impressive. It is very helpful to imagine a mythical ally acting through us. Whenever we encounter an invading spirit, we imitate the authority of Jesus Christ in Mark 9:25: “When Jesus saw that the people came running together, he rebuked the foul spirit, saying unto him, Thou dumb and deaf spirit, I charge thee, come out of him, and enter no more into him.”

A thirty-five-year-old woman who suffered because she was six kilos overweight showed us her thighs, affected by cellulite. For fifteen years, despite all sorts of treatments, she had not been able to get rid of it. Examining her family tree, we understood that this affliction of the cellular tissues symbolized her possessive mother. The woman felt that her mother, with her hatred of men, had prevented her from having a satisfactory sex life. We propose to operate to remove these six kilos of material and also to liberate her from her mother. We proceeded to wrap each thigh in a large sheet of paper, which symbolized the cellulite. Then we told her to choose a woman to represent her mother from among the course participants. She chose one. We asked the chosen woman to cling to the patient’s body and put up as much resistance as possible. We began to give orders, demanding that the impure spirit leave the body of her daughter. We tried to detach her, and she clung tight. Finally we tore her off the patient, who during this theatrical scene had wept, shouted insults at her mother, and let out her anger. Once liberated, she calmed down. We then had her lie down, simulated the opening of a channel in her thighs, and with great effort, tore off the paper that surrounded them. The woman screamed with authentic pain. We gave her the paper, crumpled into a ball. “Here’s your cellulite. Go to the bathroom, burn it, throw the ashes in the toilet, and flush it.” She did. Four months later, I received a letter from her telling me that she had entirely lost those six kilos.

In some operations in which a patient felt devalued or not accepted by his or her parents — for example, because the parents wanted a child of the opposite sex or told their child that he or she was ugly — we used a special powder to color the patient’s entire body gold or silver after the operation. We would then ask the person to go home, painted like this, for others to see. It changed the patients’ perceptions of themselves and made them feel worthy of admiration.

For a woman whose lover had left her and who could not stop suffering because of it, we ripped a piece of paper off her chest on which the man’s name was written, then simulated sinking our hands deep into her and exchanging her heart for a new one. While we were simulating pulling out the old heart with enormous strength, she cried from immense sadness combined with physical pain, which was alleviated as soon as we pretended to put in the new heart. Before closing the imaginary wound, we told her that we were going to tattoo a word on her new heart. Poking her chest with a finger dipped in gold paint, we wrote “Love.” She felt relieved and now had the energy to resume her love life.

For a fifty-year-old man who had undergone a surgical intervention to remove a tumor from his left ear and who now needed surgery on his right ear because it had also developed a tumor, we tried a psychoshamanic operation to see if we could bring about healing without the intervention of surgeons. We symbolized the growth with a ball of cotton soaked in condensed milk, which we inserted into his ear canal. Then we seated the patient on a chamber pot. Next, twelve women lined up on his right-hand side. One by one, they put their lips to his ear and whispered in a sweet voice, “My son. I love you.” When they had all spoken these words they gathered around him, and while Cristóbal extracted the symbolic tumor with a pair of tweezers, pretending that it took great effort, the women sang a lullaby. Some time later we received a letter of thanks: the tumor had disappeared.

A sixty-year-old man had a sore right knee that gave him a limp. X-rays had not revealed any anomalies. Thinking that the right leg could be associated with the father and noting that the French word for knee is genou, a word that can sound the same as je-nous (“I-us”), we asked him what kind of relationship he had with his father. The patient was deeply moved. His father had always rejected him, staying shut away in his problems. Only when he was in the hospital, suffering from a terminal illness, did the father consent to call his son in order that they might disconnect him from the machines and thus finally let him die. Our patient felt obligated to comply with his father’s wish. It was for this reason that he carried the guilt of having killed his father, which caused him to feel a rage that he repressed. This was when the pain in his knee began. Before operating on him we stuck several layers of tape onto his knee to symbolize the knee bone. We laid him down on his back, placing a participant whom the patient had previously chosen to symbolize his father on all fours on the floor on his right side, with a cushion on his back to protect him. While we “opened” the flesh and “extracted” the bone, acting as if it took a great effort to tear off the mass of tape, we asked him to express his anger by hitting his “father” on the back. He did, and amid cries of pain from the operation and insults shouted at his progenitor, he let loose his fury while dealing tremendous blows to the cushion. I put in a “new” bone and painted the knee gold. After the operation, the patient went to the participant who had received the beating and, weeping, embraced him for several emotional minutes. From that moment on, his pain was gone.

A young man was attending the course along with his wife. He loved her deeply, but had a problem: when they made love, his penis only became semierect, halfway between hard and soft. This defect was ruining the couple’s sex life. Luckily, the man’s father and mother were also attending the course. Looking at the family tree, we saw that all the men were childish and committed the sin of being absent and that the women were invasively possessive and considered sexuality sinful because of the religious prejudices of their upbringing. We also saw that there was tension between the man’s wife and his mother: the wife thought that the mother had not loved her son, causing him to be stuck at a childish level and, as her husband, to be dependent on her. The four participants, in a genuine search for a balanced life, let down their defenses and became conscious of the root of the problem. We then proceeded with the operation: the man lay down on a table, naked, on his back. I held one leg, Cristóbal held the other, and two other participants held his arms; his mother lay on top of him, clinging to his body. Outside the room, behind a closed door, his father waited. His wife, leaning near to his left ear, whispered constantly, over and over again, “I love you.” The patient’s task was to try to shake his mother off, but the people holding his arms and legs would not let him move. Then he was to shout for his father to get help. The father struck the door with great violence, then opened it, rushed at the mother, and after simulating an intense struggle, removed her. The mother then had to blow as if inflating a balloon, with all her affection, on the region of her son’s heart, and the father had to blow similarly on his perineum, to breathe new manly strength into him. Meanwhile I pretended to cut off his sex organs, placing my fingers around the penis and testicles. I held the sex organs and gave the impression of pulling them off. I then implanted new imaginary sex organs. After the procedure we sprinkled the operated area with holy water, then had the father and mother take their son and place him in his wife’s arms. At that moment, the four of them burst into tears and embraced each other in relief and affection. The next day the couple happily came to tell us that the erection was now perfect.