When did all this begin? I often see people burdened by problems dating back to the First World War because a great-grandfather returned from the front with lung disease caused by toxic gases, which caused him emotional disturbances, an inability to fulfill himself, moral devaluation. And when the father is weak or absent, the mother becomes dominant, invasive, and is no longer a mother. The absence of a father brings about that of the mother. The children grow up with a thirst for caresses, which translates into repressed anger that extends through several generations. The lack of touch is the greatest abuse suffered by a child. All this garbage affects us, even if it is not conscious. The relationships between our parents and our aunts and uncles trickle down onto us. For example, Jaime hated Benjamín, his younger brother. I was Jaime’s younger child. I became a screen onto which his brother was projected. This allowed him to vent his bottled-up hatred onto me. Even if we know nothing of rapes, abortions, suicides, shameful events, incarcerated relatives, venereal diseases, alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, or countless other secrets in our families, we still suffer from all of it, and sometimes we repeat it. A boy is named René, which means “reborn,” and feels himself invaded by a vampire-like personality, not knowing that he was born after another sibling died. A father gives his daughter the name of the woman who was his first love, and this dooms her to playing the role of his girlfriend for life. A mother gives her son the name of his maternal grandfather, and the son fruitlessly tries to be like that grandfather in order to satisfy his mother’s incestuous desires. Or, in a family with many daughters, one of them in desiring to give the father an heir to carry on his name will have a one-night stand with a strange man, a foreigner who will then return to his home country, leaving her pregnant. Symbolically this child is engendered by God; she is imitating the Virgin Mary. The Virgin was possessed by her father; he introduced himself completely into her womb, changed himself into his own son, then created a man-god pairing. Together forever, the two now reign in heaven, as if in a marriage. If a single mother gives birth to a son who, metaphorically, is the child of her father, and calls him Jesús or Emmanuel or Salvador, or in fact the name of any saint, then that child will live an anguished life, feeling obligated to be perfect. The sacred texts, when misinterpreted, play a nefarious role in this family catastrophe. Extremist religions create sexual frustrations, illnesses, suicides, wars, and unhappiness. Perverse interpretations of the Torah, the New Testament, the Koran, and the Sutras have caused more deaths than the atomic bomb.
The tree, with all its limbs, behaves as an individual, a living being. I dubbed the study of its problems “psychogenealogy” (just as I called the study of the Tarot “tarology”; years later, “tarologists” and “psychogenealogists” became abundant). Some therapists who have conducted studies in genealogy have wanted to reduce it to mathematical formulas, but the tree cannot be contained in a rational cage; the subconscious is not scientific, it is artistic. The study of families must be performed in a different way. A geometric body, with the relationships between its parts completely known, cannot be modified. In an organic body whose relationships are mysterious, you can add or remove a part, but in its essence it will still be what it is. The internal relationships of the family tree are mysterious. To understand them it is necessary to enter the tree as if in a dream, so it should not be interpreted, it should be experienced.
In a seminar in France, working with the minor arcana of the Tarot.
The patient must make peace with her subconscious, not becoming independent of it but making it an ally. If we learn its language, we can put it to work for us. If the family within us, rooted in childhood memory, is the basis of our subconscious, then we must develop each relative as an archetype. We must ascribe our level of consciousness to it, exalt it, imagine it reaching its highest potential. Everything we give it, we are giving to ourselves. When we deny it, we deny ourselves. As for toxic people, we should transform them by saying, “This is what they did to me, this is what I felt, this is what the abuse causes in me today, this is the reparation I desire.” Then, still within ourselves, we must bring all the relatives and ancestors to their fulfillment. A Zen master once said, “Buddha nature is also in a dog.” This means that we must imagine the perfection of every person in our family. Does someone have a heart full of bitterness, a brain clouded by prejudice, deviant sexuality due to moral abuses? Like a shepherd with his sheep we must guide them to the good path, cleansing them of their poisonous needs, desires, emotions, and thoughts. A tree is judged by its fruits, so if the fruit is bitter the tree it came from, even if it is majestic, is considered bad. If the fruit is sweet, the crooked tree it comes from is considered good. Our family — past, present, and future — is the tree. We are the fruit that gives it its value.