As my clients increased in number, on some weekends I had to receive them in groups. To heal a family, I organized a dramatization of it. The person whose family was being studied would choose from among the participants, picking those who would represent her parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, brothers, and sisters. Then she would situate them, standing, seated on chairs, or lying down (for the chronically ill or dead), at various distances from each other, according to the logic of her family tree. Who was the hero of the family, the most powerful person? Which people were absent or despised? Which people were joined together and by what sort of ties? And so forth. Then the patient would situate herself. Where? At the center, on the edge, or removed from all of them? How did she feel there? Then, she had to confront each “actor.” Representing the family in this way, as a living sculpture, the seeker discovers that the people she has “randomly” chosen correspond in many aspects to the real people in her family and have important things to say to her. This produces a conversation that generally ends in intense embraces and tears.
These exercises leave us convinced that, having become conscious of these unhealthy relationships, we are now cured. However, once we return from the therapeutic situation into the real world, the painful symptoms are still there as always. Merely identifying a difficulty is not enough to overcome it! A gain in awareness, a theatrical confrontation, and an imagined forgiving end up being fruitless when not followed up by action in daily life. I concluded that I should induce people to act in the midst of what they conceived as their reality. But I was reluctant to do so. What right did I have to intrude in the lives of others, exerting an influence that could easily degenerate into a power grab, establishing dependencies? I was in a difficult position, considering that the people who came to see me were, in a way, asking me to become their father, mother, son, husband, wife. I decided to induce them to act in order for the gaining of consciousness to be effective. I did not call these people my patients, but my clients. I prescribed very specific actions, without assuming responsibility or taking on the role of their guide over their entire lives. Thus was born the psychomagical act, combining all the influences I had assimilated during the years described in the preceding chapters.
First, the person would agree to carry out the act exactly as I prescribed it, without one iota of change. To prevent distortions due to failures of memory, the client had to immediately write down the procedure to follow. Once the act was carried out they were to send me a letter that first described the instructions received, then related in full detail the way in which the act was carried out as well as the circumstances and incidents that occurred in the process. Lastly, the results should be described. Some people waited a year to send me the letter. Others argued, not wanting to do exactly what I recommended, bargaining and finding all manner of excuses to avoid following the instructions precisely.
As I observed with Pachita, when you change something, however minimally, and do not respect the indispensable conditions for the achievement of the act, the effects will be null or negative. Indeed, most of the problems we have, we want to have. We are attached to our problems. They form our identity. We define ourselves through them. It is no wonder, then, that some people try to distort the act and try to devise ways to sabotage it: getting free of problems involves radically changing our relationship with ourselves and with the past. People want to stop suffering, but are not willing to pay the price — namely, to change, to not keep living as a function of their beloved problems. For all these reasons, the responsibility of prescribing an act that must be carried out to the letter was immense. In the moment of prescribing it I had to cease identifying with myself so that I could go into a kind of trance, stop talking with my subconscious, and connect directly with the subconscious of my client. I concentrated on the mere act of giving, alleviating pain, prescribing actions that were similar to lucid dreams, without worrying about the personal benefit that would accrue to me. In order to be in a condition to heal someone, you must not expect anything from that person; you must enter all the aspects of his or her inner self without becoming involved or destabilized.
In The Book of Five Rings the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi recommends going to the ring early, before a fight, and acquiring a perfect knowledge of it. Likewise, familiarity with the client’s psychoaffective terrain seemed to me a fundamental requirement for the recommendation of any act, so before anything else I would ask them to tell me about their problem in as much detail as possible. Rather than trying to guess what the Tarot might be hiding from me, I would put the person through an intense interrogation. I would ask about his or her birth, parents, uncles and aunts, grandparents, siblings, sex life, relationship with money, social complexes, beliefs, love life, health, guilty feelings. (Often enough, this resembles a church confession.) Terrible secrets would emerge. One man confessed to me that as a child, at the end of the school year, he had waited on top of a wall for a hated teacher to pass and had thrown a large stone at his head. He thought that the teacher had died, but fled without checking. For thirty years, he felt like a murderer. Another time I met with a Belgian father. I perceived that he was gay. “Yes,” he confessed, “and I do it with ten men a day, in the saunas, every time I come to Paris. Do you know what my problem is? I’d like to do it with fourteen of them, like a friend of mine does!” From people who seemed normal, I heard the darkest and most outlandish secrets. One woman confessed to me that the father of her daughter was none other than her own father; a Swiss teenager, seduced by his mother, told me all the details. What most disturbed him was her jealousy, because she would not let him have any girlfriends. Because they did not perceive any criticism in me, people vented with confidence. If the therapist judges in the name of some morality, he does not cure. The attitude of the confessor must be amoral. Otherwise, the secrets never come to light. I am reminded of a Buddhist story.
Two monks are meditating in the midst of nature; several rabbits surround one monk, but none come near the other. The latter asks, “If we both meditate with equal intensity the same number of hours each day, why do the rabbits surround you and not me?”
“Very simple,” replies the other, “Because I do not eat rabbit, and you do.”
A participant in one of my courses could not bear for her chest to be touched. As soon as a man, even one with whom she wanted to have sexual relations, made a move to touch her breasts, she would start screaming. This situation caused her much suffering, and she longed to be free from this senseless panic. I suggested that she bare her chest. She did so, revealing a nice pair of breasts. I asked, “Do you trust me?”