Jodorowsky, Alejandro - Psychomagic - The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Everyone applauded and left the theater. At two in the morning, the theater was again full. I began the ceremony that Alain-Yves Leyaouanc had proposed to me. I got dressed in a suit from the 1920s; I shaved the pubic hair of his young wife to the sound of sacred music. On her body, she had glued dominoes. It was a very moving act, and the spirit in which it was accomplished quickly generated a religious atmosphere. There was also a copy in plaster of Rodin’s Penseur in which we made holes with blows of a hammer. Jets of China ink came out of the head of the thinker, then we let two thousand little birds loose in the theater. As I told you, I was at the end of the happening, so cleaned of myself that the birds came and landed on my head without my paying any attention.

What was the meaning of this public demonstration?

It was like an ordination, the ritual sacrifice of what had, for a long time, molded my life. This happening, at the same time that it made history, ended a period of my life. I left exhausted, battered, and I thought a lot about it. I had always seen, prowling around me, the ghost of darkness, and I felt more than ever that theater should go toward the light. However, I told myself, never forget that the lotus grows out of the mud. One must explore the muck, stir death and dirt to go toward clearer skies. My main concern from then on was to promote positive, enlightened, and liberating theater. So I realized that I needed to become completely different, and I began to practice theater counseling. If someone—no matter who—desired to do theater, I would communicate the following theory: The theater is a magical force, a personal and a nontransmissible experience. It belongs not only to actors but also to the whole world. A decision, a rough resolution, is enough for this force to transform your life. It is time for human beings to let go of conditioned reflexes, hypnotic systems, erroneous self-concepts. World literature devotes many pages to the theme of the “double,” which, little by little, expels a man from his own life, takes over his favorite places, his friendships, his family, his work, until it makes him an outcast and, at times, his own assassin, according to some versions of the universal myth. For my part, I believe that we are the “double” and not the original.

You want to say that we identify ourselves with a person who is but a mere caricature of our deeper self?

Exactly. Our self-concept . . .

In other words, the idea that we make of ourselves . . .

Yes, our ego. It doesn’t matter the name that we give to this agent of alienation; it is never more than a pale copy, an approximation of our essential self. We identify ourselves with this double that is as erratic as it is illusory. And suddenly, the “original” appears. The ruler begins to take back the place that belongs to him. The limited “me” then feels persecuted, in danger of death, and rightly so. For the “original” will, in the end, dissolve the double. As much as humans identify with the double, we must understand that the frightening invader is nothing but ourselves, our own deeper self. Nothing belongs to us; everything belongs to the “original.” Our only chance is that the Other arises and eliminates us. We do not suffer from this murder, but we will take part. It acts as a sacred sacrifice in which we give ourselves entirely to the master, without anguish.

How can theater help someone return to the, using your expression, “original”?

Because we live enclosed in what I call our autoconcept, the idea one has of oneself, why not adopt a completely other point of view? For example, tomorrow, you can be Rimbaud. You will wake up as Rimbaud, and you will brush your teeth; you will dress like him, you will think like him, travel the city like him . . . For one week, twenty-four hours a day, and for no other spectator than yourself, you will be the poet, acting like him with your friends and acquaintances without providing them with any explanation. You will achieve being an author-actor-spectator, producing yourself not in a theater but in real life.

If I understand right, you explain this theory to your clients, then you create a program for them.

That’s it! I establish a program, an act or a series of acts to accomplish in life in a given time frame: five hours, twelve hours, twenty-four hours . . . An elaborate program based on their problem, designed to crack the character with whom they have identified themselves in order to help them reunite with their deeper self. For an atheist, I made him adopt the personality of a saint for a few weeks. For an indifferent mother, I assigned the duty of imitating maternal love for a century. To a judge, I gave the task of disguising himself as a tramp and go begging at a restaurant. From his pockets, he should take out handfuls of glass doll eyes. I thus created a character intended to establish itself in daily life and to better it. This is how my theatrical research gradually began to take on a therapeutic dimension. From being a director, I turned into a theatrical counselor, giving people their directions to take their place as a character in the comedy of existence.

I confess that I’m skeptical about the effects of this theatrical therapy, although the idea in itself is very interesting. How can an indifferent mother adopt the character of a loving mother and above all manage to achieve it during her lifetime?

First of all, do not forget that my clients all suffered being dominated by their double. If they came to me, it was precisely because they felt bad in their role and sensed a completely different nature in themselves than the “original.” The process is founded, then, in a client’s real desire to change. The indifferent mother, for example, suffers from not being able to transmit love to her son. In addition, I believe in the virtues of imitation, in the good sense of the word. A saint engages himself in the “imitation of Jesus Christ.” Why cannot an atheist, in his disbelief, begin to imitate a saint?

Why not? Exactly. So, all imitation of this type—which is equivalent to what is also called asceticism or spiritual practice—is really not that easy to implement day after day . . .

I grant you that. But if the mother could be a little less indifferent thanks to this approach and if the atheist took a step toward saintliness, isn’t that marvelous in itself?

THREE

THE ONEIRIC ACT

The interpretation of dreams is a major part of the work of the artist-shaman-director theater-clown mystic in the search for that other form of madness, which is wisdom.

Yes, although the interpretation of dreams is a practice as old as the world. With time, the only thing that has changed is the forms of interpretations, from a simplistic system, which consists of systematically attributing a concrete symbolic significance to this or that image, to Jung’s concept, which holds that one should not explain the dream but rather continue living it, by means of analysis, in the enlightened state, for the end result of seeing where this leads. The next stage, situated beyond all interpretation, consists of entering the lucid dream, in which you know you are dreaming; this knowledge gives you the ability to work on the contents of the dream.

It is the practice made popular through the writings of Carlos Castaneda.

He popularized it, but he didn’t invent it. Actually, the first book dedicated to lucid dreaming that I know of was published in France: Les rêves et les moyens de les diriger [Dreams and How to Direct Them] by Hervey de Saint-Denis. As early as 1867, this author hit on the essential question, as you can appreciate in this excerpt that I want to read to you: