Once the subconscious decides that something should happen, it is impossible for the individual to inhibit or completely sublimate the impulse. Once the arrow is launched, one cannot make it return to the bow. The only way to free oneself from the impulse is to fulfill it. but this can be done metaphorically.
Many children who have been disliked by their parents grow up with the desire to eliminate them. While they do not do this, they remain submerged in a depression that can lead to suicide, addiction, or fatal disease. For these people I recommend hanging a portrait of the mother from the neck of a black hen and a portrait of the father from the neck of a red rooster. Then they should cut the throats of both chickens and bathe in their blood. After plucking them, they should cook them and serve them at a party with a group of friends. The black and red feathers and the other remains of the animals should be buried and a sapling planted above them.
Cases of female frigidity in which I detected a sexual fixation on the father have been cured by the recommendation that the woman print a photograph of her father on a t-shirt and make love with her partner while he wears that shirt. Thus, metaphorically, the incestuous desire is fulfilled and overcome. One woman who came to see me suffered from wounds and burns in her vagina each time she made love. Looking at her family tree, I could see that at age thirteen she had been separated from her Italian father. To conduct the metaphorical incest, I suggested that she cook a package of spaghetti in three liters of water. She should then send the spaghetti in a bag to her father and douche with the cooking water. She was cured.
It is not possible to eliminate an anxiety or an irrational fear by trying to reason with the client to show him that what he fears can never happen. One must push him toward the anxiety in order to bring about, metaphorically, what he fears so much. In this, I was inspired by an anecdote from the American psychiatrist Milton Erickson, who, as a child, saw his father’s workers trying to get a stubborn bull into the corral. The bull refused to budge. For all their pushing, they could not move him. Erickson approached them, took the animal’s tail, and tugged on it. Feeling that he was being given an order to retreat, the stubborn bovine took off running toward the corral.
When a person feels possessed — by somebody in her family, a witch, or some evil person — it is impossible to convince her that this is not the case by giving reasons. However well she may accept it intellectually, her emotional center will reject it. She must be treated as a possessed person and must submit to an act that resembles an exorcism. To accomplish this, her entire body should be covered by copies of a photograph or a drawing of the invader, stuck on with a mixture of clay, flour, and water. Then these images should be ripped off while yelling furious orders such as, “Out! Leave this person in peace! Go back to yourself!” Once they have all been torn off, the patient should be bathed, perfumed, and dressed in new clothes. The photographs should be buried and a chrysanthemum planted there.
It may also be advisable to make a fake identification document for the patient with a false name, age, and profession, to mislead whoever wants to possess him. In some central European Jewish families, when someone is gravely ill they call the rabbi to change his name. Thus, when death comes to look for him, it will not find him.
The psychoanalyst Chantal Rialland, who studied with me for many years, writes in her book Cette famille qui vit en nous (The Family That Lives in Us), “With regard to the child, the parents feel anguish as a function of their own problems, as a consequence of their childhood and adolescence. They feel this with all the more intensity if the father and mother have felt unwanted, rejected, or not conforming to the family’s wishes: ‘We hope everything will go well and be normal,’ ‘We hope the birth will be easy.’ Perhaps the last birth in the family was difficult, or perhaps one of the women in the family died in childbirth, a mother, grandmother, great-grandmother, or aunt: ‘We hope it won’t be as bad as it was for Grandma Agatha,’ ‘We hope she won’t be a druggie like our cousin,’ ‘A whore like our aunt,’ ‘Unfaithful like Grandmother Ernestine,’ ‘We hope he won’t be an alcoholic like Grandpa Arthur,’ ‘A homosexual like Uncle Peter,’ ‘Lazy and womanizing like our paternal grandfather.’ Some parents dread the crisis of adolescence: ‘We hope he’ll find a decent woman,’ ‘When I think that my daughter will belong to another man. ’ On the affective plane, every child is compared to his or her family, and since this is a mechanism that tends to reproduce itself, the parents’ fears act in the background as curses.”
Georg Groddeck in The Book of the It writes, “Fear is the result derived from the repression of a desire,” and “Fear is desire: those who fear rape, desire it.” During childhood it is through the psyches of our parents that the family injects its desires into our minds in the form of fears. Arrows that were shot many generations ago arrive to strike us, demanding that we fulfill their self-destructive impulses: “You have to develop the same cancer that your grandfather had,” “You have to lose your ovaries like so many of your ancestors did,” “Alcoholism is a family tradition,” “The son of the tiger must be born with stripes,” “If the mother’s a whore, the daughter’s a whore.” Unless they can be fulfilled metaphorically through an act of psychomagic, these family curses will obsess us for our whole lives.
A psychoanalyst could not shake off the fear of losing her patients and ending up on the street, homeless, a beggar. I advised her to disguise herself as an indigent (dirty and worn out clothes, hair encrusted with dirt, red nose) and receive clients thus in her office. She must also have a liter of wine by her side and a few crusts of hard bread.
“And what am I going to tell them?”
“Tell them you’re doing an act of psychomagic.”
“And for how long do I have to present myself like this?”
“You’re thirty years old. You will be a psychoanalyst-beggar for thirty days.”
A wife was obsessed with the desire to have many lovers, but due to a high appreciation of fidelity, she contained herself. I suggested that she trick her husband by remaining faithful to him.
“That’s what I want, but it’s impossible!”
“It is possible, metaphorically. First of all, you should confess these desires to your husband and convince him to collaborate with you. He will rent a hotel room. Then he will call you, imitating someone else’s voice, and tell you to come there for a rendezvous. When you arrive at the room, he will be waiting there disguised as someone else, with a false mustache, beard, or wig, and acting with gestures he never uses. Without saying a word, you two should make love. Then he will leave. You will go back home, where your husband, having restored his own personality, will be waiting for you. He will ask you, ‘Where were you?’ And you’ll answer with a lie: ‘I was at the dentist’s.’ This act should be repeated several times, each time disguising your husband as a different person.”
The family incessantly makes predictions about us: “If you do not study, you will fail in life,” “You don’t have a good ear; don’t sing,” “You are insufferable; no man will want to marry you,” “If you keep on like this, you’ll end up in jail.” The subconscious tends to fulfill the prediction. Anne A. Schutzberger, a professor at the University of Nice, mentions one aspect of this phenomenon: “If one carefully examines the past of a number of patients seriously ill with cancer, one will find that in many cases, they are people who unconsciously developed a ‘life script’ during their childhood, sometimes even with the date, time, day, or age at which they will die, and then they find themselves actually in this situation of dying. For example, at age thirty-three — the age at which Jesus Christ died — or forty-five — the age at which a father or mother died, and so on. These are all examples of a kind of automatic fulfillment of personal or family predictions.”