Alejandro Jodorowsky - The Dance of Reality - A Psychomagical Autobiography

Psychoshamanic sex change operation (Mexico, 1997). My assistant is an actual surgeon.

An older woman had lumps of fat on many parts of her body. Upon studying her family tree we observed that her maternal grandmother had suffered from the death of a pair of twins during childbirth, a girl and a boy. She had never recovered. Our patient’s mother had watched her own mother being consumed by inconsolable sorrow for many years. When our patient was born, her mother had given her the name of the dead female twin, unconsciously wishing to relieve the grandmother’s suffering. Her grandmother had effectively raised her, but in an atmosphere of sadness: the male twin had never been replaced. When we told her that the lumps of fat were the representation of the dead child within her she said, “I always thought I had a twin brother somewhere.” We proceeded with the operation. We pretended to push all the lumps into one location, in the belly. Then, as if they were all in a single packet, we pushed them up toward her throat and, with implacable authority, we ordered, “Vomit the twin! You do not need him in order to be loved!” I put a plastic bag under her mouth. She retched strongly and began vomiting. When finished, we tied the bag shut and told her to go with her mother to bury it by her grandmother’s grave. In a letter, she told us that she had done this and that her lumps of fat had begun to disappear. But she wondered if it was because of the operation or because she was following a strict diet. How difficult it is to be grateful!

A young man, twenty-five years old, asked us for help because he felt incapable of loving. He had come to the course accompanied by his mother. We had asked him to do so because he had a symbiotic relationship with her. His father, a weak man and an alcoholic, had been expelled from the home, and the son, very young at the time, had taken on his role. He and the mother had been in Lacanian psychoanalysis for five years, which had enabled them to become aware of their Oedipal bond but not to solve the problem. We told the mother to wrap a thick red silk cord around the man’s neck seven times, as we knew that he had been born with the umbilical cord wrapped seven times around his neck. We had him write on a piece of paper, “Mama, you are the only woman I will ever love in my life. Yours forever. ” and his signature. We slathered this contract with gum arabic, slid it under his shirt, and stuck it over his heart. We wrapped him from head to toe in a wet sheet and tied him up with the remainder of the red silk cord, wrapping it around him. Then we gave his mother a pair of tailor’s scissors and told her to start by cutting the red silk, saying “Free!” with each cut, louder every time. Then we tore off the sheet, as if removing a noxious aura, and removed him from the cocoon. The man, almost motionless, in a kind of trance, let himself be carried. Simulating a huge effort, we removed the sticky contract. He shouted with physical and mental pain and wept like a child. Then we asked his mother to cut the seven rings of silk that were wrapped around his neck, saying, “Ring one: for you, my son, pure love and love of life. Ring two: for you, my son, love of the mother and love of the father. Ring three: for you, my son, love of yourself and love of another. Ring four: for you, my son, love of the family and love of humanity. Ring five: for you, my son, love of all living beings and love of the planet. Ring six: for you, my son, love of the stars and love of the universe. Ring seven: for you, my son, love of all creation and love of the Creative Consciousness.” When she had finished reciting these words, which we had been whispering in his ear, the mother and son fell into each other’s arms, sobbing and forgiving one another. After a while, they separated, happy, both feeling liberated.

A couple asked us for help. They quarreled continuously over futile causes, but once they started, they could not stop: they kept on intensifying their insults and raising their voices. He was exasperated with her because she would not stop shouting until he started to strangle her. He was afraid he would kill her someday. She felt attached to him and, despite the danger, could not leave. Studying their family trees, the wife mentioned that her three brothers had raped her when she was twelve years old. To stop her from protesting, they had held her down, strangling her. The husband recalled having seen his father strangle his mother during their fights. Now he had to struggle against his own desire to strangle women, while his wife had to struggle against her desire to be strangled. We proceeded with the operation. We asked her to choose three men from among the attendees to represent her brothers. We explained to her that after the rape, she had remained possessed by them. The three men clung to her, holding her by the neck. All the women in the course, about twenty of them, had to make them release their prey by shouting insults and ordering them to leave this “girl” alone. The men pretended to resist, then finally let her go. The victim’s sobs were convulsive. We laid her down and proceeded, metaphorically, to remove her vagina and replace it with another one. We painted her outer labia and pubic hair bright silver. For her husband, who said that he felt he had the hands of a murderer, ten men and ten women “detached” his “father” and “mother” from him, then “cut off ” the hands that he so detested and put on “new” hands, painting them gold. From their letter of thanks, we learned that their fights had ceased.

These operations, due to their extremely unusual nature, produce a state of attention so intense that therapists, patients, and observers enter a psychological dimension in which their sensations of time and space change, as was the case with Pachita. They are entirely “there,” in the “moment.” The actions and reactions are intertwined in a perfect form, and because all are a product of this intense moment, there is no possibility of error. The world is concentrated on the operation. One can compare this to moments that occur in a traditional bullfight. In that deadly ceremony, at a given moment the bullfighter and the bull enter the ring, they merge, they join, the charge and the deception become a single thing, and this dance becomes a magnet that irresistibly attracts the attention of the public. The healer’s hands are rooted in the world. It is not an individual who operates; it is all of humanity. It is not the bullfighter that makes passes; it is the very audience. In one case, life is given, in the other, death. The essence of that similarity must be discovered.

Fundamentally, every illness is a lack of consciousness saturated with fear. This unconsciousness is rooted in a prohibition imposed without prior conviction, which the victims must accept without understanding. It requires the child to be what she is not. If she disobeys, she is punished. The greatest punishment is not being loved.

The psychoshaman, like the primitive healer, should operate by circumventing not only the patient’s defenses but also his or her fears. Purely rational education prohibits us from using the body to its full extent, making the skin the limit of our being, making us believe that it is normal to live in a reduced space. This education strips sex of its creative power, giving us the illusion that we live only for a short time, denying our eternal essence. By means of a devaluing philosophy, sublime sentiments are extirpated from our emotional center. We are instilled with a fear of change, and we maintain an infantile level of consciousness in which we venerate toxic security and detest healthy uncertainty. By all means possible, supported by political, moral, and religious doctrines, we are made ignorant of our mental power.