Psychomagic depends on very simple, creative solutions that have no limits. The solutions are not aggressive things; they are benign things, never destructive. For example, if we bury something, we have to plant something. Creativity should not be viewed from a harmful side or as a possibility to do harm, you understand? Because creativity from the harmful side converts into destructibility. And destructibility doesn’t interest us.
Can someone apply Psychomagic herself or is a teacher needed?
Of course one can apply it herself. I do it continuously. I have appropriate and sacred fetishes and comical ones also. I have created a little altar, conditional reflections.
What characteristics does a person have to have in order to cure another?
It is not to cure another, it is to help another cure himself. He who wants to cure another is conceited. Not even the other cures. God cures. I believe that the motive power of all of this is goodwill. When a person develops in himself a feeling of goodwill, it informs the feelings of others and does what it can to take away the bad. One has to put himself in the other’s place to make it possible for the other to discover how to cure himself. To do this, the other must raise his level of consciousness and rearrange his vision of things. We all perceive life from a particular point of view, more or less variable and at a certain height. When we change this point of view, our lives change.
The therapist should put aside morality in order to cure?
She should be amoral, but not immoral. Immorality reveals an illness. For the therapist to be amoral means she does not judge. Like a doctor: if an assassin has a wound, the surgeon helps him and stitches the wound. The therapist should act in the same way. She has to put aside her prejudices and, even more, still act as a psychological therapist.
To cure, is a certain personal disinterest and distance essential?
We should specify what is understood by “disinterest.” It is good to not want anything from the person, but this also requires a certain cynicism and indifference. The therapist has an interest in curing the person, and it is precisely this interest that creates the disinterest. I speak only of those therapists who do not seek to gain money or swindle people, as some fortune-tellers do. There is another kind of interest, which manifests when the psychotherapist has a complex against the client and wants to convert himself into a support for the sick, to reinforce his own ego, or to exploit his narcissistic interest. Other times they give in to political or social interests. I knew a psychoanalyst who systematically destroyed couples because she hated men. There is also the desire to be loved. Or the simplest: to try to be a patient’s friend, but this one must also be put aside to be able to cure.
You usually say healing is everything but a surrealist game, but your psychomagic prescriptions include a lot of games and even humor.
There is some humor, but what happens is that when we do something we have never done, we are already on the road to healing. We must break the routines. As we speak of the unconscious language or of dreams, these acts can appear strange. This path is contrary to that taken by Freud with psychoanalysis and dream interpretation. Psychoanalysis notes the dreams and interprets them in light of reason; it goes from the unconscious to the rational. I go in reverse. I take the rational and capsize it in the language of dreams, introducing dreams into the language of reality. Psychomagic acts build dreams into reality. If these things do not happen, it is necessary to make them happen. Reality seeks oneiric liberation, and we need to make something happen so that someone heals. Everything that is irrational either makes you laugh or frightens you. Laughter or fear: they are only reactions to get out of the ordinary.
The truth is that Psychomagic has become popular. How do you take that?
I find many psychomagic acts being carried out on the street that I have not prescribed. (Laughter.) It is true that people are using it a lot. At first I was very discreet. For years, I gave advice and wrote it down. Then Gilles Farcet came along, and we wrote a book about Psychomagic, which took him four years to finish while I continued working. When the book came out in France, it was a big success, and they translated it into Castilian and Italian. People began to seek me out, and then I could experiment. For one year, I received, each day, two people in my home in order to try to develop the rules of Psychomagic. I thought it was part of my creativity and that, before I died, I had to be able to teach the rules to my son Cristóbal, my wife Marianne, and then to a few therapists. I continued training people, but the process is very slow. It takes at least four or five years of experience and a lot of artistic activity.
The fundamental difference between this therapy and psychoanalysis is that psychoanalysis was created by people who came from the university and science, while I have created a technique that comes from art and theater. I say a scientist cannot be a therapist. Treatment is the work of artists and poets. If you are not that, you cannot cure.
It works completely with the body but keeping in mind the existence of the ghost body, on which you have done much investigation.
I began to study religions: Tantra, yoga, alchemy, Zen, Chinese medicine, the Kabbalah. I realized that each culture creates an imaginary biology that actually works. For example, I studied the Muladhara chakra, which is between the sex and the anus. It is like a four-petaled flower that has in its center an elephant with the trunk raised. At first, I thought, “I truly do not feel I have any flower between the penis and the anus.” But when I went to India, I decided to ride an elephant, to see what it was like. And so I knew why they said this about that chakra: when you ride an elephant, you feel the strength of nature. The elephant moves like a gyroscope, it does not lean to the right or to the left, it moves like a ship on a calm sea. It is as if you have the monumental strength of the earth between your legs. So, I realized, that these flowers and this elephant are metaphors that must be understood in their cultural sense; they are locations in the body, but they are imaginary.
I tell many people who want to learn do-in massage*4 to not press the body with the thumb looking for mythical meridians. I teach them in an hour to push with the thumb on the person’s whole body, and the patient heals. Chakras and meridians are imaginary biology. The body is a whole. I was interested in imaginary biology because I realized that when you imagine your body, you are creating it. Castaneda has a strong imaginary biology, with the assembly point and all that, which comes from European esotericism, the aura and such. I also studied mutilated bodies, those with what’s called “ghost members.”
What advice would you give for losing the fears we suffer?
Each one is distinct, but I have always said it is necessary to manifest them in a psychomagic shape. You must first discover what you are afraid of; then you can overcome it. If a person is afraid of dying, I make her go to a funeral or I bury her symbolically. Whoever fears poverty, I send him to another city to beg for a day. I make the client live on the edge of what she fears, to face it.