Manual of Psychomagic: The Practice of Shamanic Psychotherapy

Psychomagic Consultations

What Lies Hidden in the Darkness of the Unconscious?

The psychomagic advice in the first part of this book can be applied to any problem suffered as indicated in the consultation title; however, it is necessary to adapt the actions, with some changes, to the character of each individual and to the configurations of each person’s genealogy tree. Whoever wishes to delve into these techniques with the purpose of prescribing acts to others or to him- or herself, I present here some of the numerous consultations I did in 2007 and in the café in Paris where I read the Tarot every Wednesday. During my five-hour consulting sessions, each meeting with each of the thirty-plus people I saw lasted no more than eight minutes. The Tarot, used as a psychological test, combined with a definite intuitive evolution acquired thanks to more than thirty years of study, allows me to go without force directly to the consultant’s essential problem, gently finding a door in the consultant’s defensive wall. Generally, whoever suffers does not wish to know why he or she suffers but only wants to get rid of his or her painful symptoms. Illnesses and psychological suffering are essentially caused by a lack of consciousness. The cause of injury is so painful that it is hidden in the darkness of the unconscious. In combat, warriors strenuously fight to kill the enemy. In a Tarot session, one fights strenuously to return the other to life. At the beginning of my readings, sometimes this combat is made by using a lot of violence.

I tell of this attitude, which I learned from my Zen meditation teacher, Ejo Takata (1928–1997), in my book El Maestro y Las Magas. When I learned that it is one thing to give and another to force someone to receive, I then began to move forward on a sweet and compassionate path. I eliminated from my heart all types of discrimination; I expelled from my soul the unforgiving judge who wielded a morality based on poorly translated and poorly interpreted religious texts. For the duration of these consultations, I forgot myself and concentrated totally on the person in front of me. I opened my mind, motivated only by the desire to be useful and to offer a loving ear, to accept any rejection with kindness, seeing it as an important part of the healing process.

Psychomagic is not a scientific discipline; it is an artistic creation of theatrical origin, which tends to awaken the creativity in the consultant, turning the consultant into his or her own healer. This longtime activity was useful for me, too. Naturally, little by little, I was opening the gate that was between my intellect and my unconscious. Barely revealing the source of the problem, without the least effort, I reach the psychomagic act, with the client’s corresponding astonishment, because, upon my stating the act, something seemingly impossible, surreal, or absurd corresponded with what the consultant was experiencing. I told an elegant, stylish gentleman, “Get close to your young son. You should invite him on a motorcycle ride.” And this gentleman told me he had just bought a motorcycle. I advised a woman to ride on a horse then rub the beast’s sweat on her, and she told me she owned a riding school. In both of these consultations, the consultants smiled with relief upon hearing the act I advised. This was precisely what they came looking for. If you, the reader, can identify with the consultant’s problem, and the act I propose resonates with you, you can do it, adapting it to your own reality. If, for example, I speak of visiting a grave, the loved one could be in a burial place or may have been cremated: it doesn’t change the act, whether it is carried out at a grave site or where the ashes were scattered. Sometimes something very difficult is asked. How does one ask an adult to find a woman who is nursing who will let him nurse? Although the consultant often rejects this act, one must insist. If a person is persistent and has faith, everything he seeks comes to him. Modifying the proverb “If the mountain doesn’t come to you, then go to the mountain,” we must say, with fervor, “I am not going to the mountain, but I wish with all of my soul that the mountain will come to me.”

The psychologist Jacques Lacan (1901–1981), during a class, told his students, “In a moment of creative ecstasy, first talk and then think.” The messages from the unconscious have the spontaneity of dreams. They are not created by the intellect. The person prescribing a psychomagic act first receives it from the unconscious then recommends it, just as it is dictated by the unconscious. Explications, products of the rational mind, clarify some aspects of the act but do not exhaust its mystery.

I ask each consultant, if he or she carries out the suggested act, to then send me a card telling me the details of the experience and the result obtained. So the reader can see how these encounters develop, I’ve included a response below, which describes a consultation I had with a pregnant woman who wanted to have a normal and happy delivery but whose physician threatened her with a cesarean section:

We went to see you on the 10th of October, 2007, my wife and I, accompanied by our four-year-old son. Noticing my wife was pregnant, you asked her:

“This is your second? What is the first one named?”

“Ethan.”

“And the second, what name will you give him?”

“Nathan.”

“That is a mistake! It is too similar to Ethan. If you want your son to have his own individuality, choose another name. Why are you here for Tarot?”

“I am going to deliver in the next two weeks. My son is upside down. My doctor says he will be forced to remove him by way of cesarean. My husband, who is a psychotherapist, and I know very well why this occurs. I am afraid of repeating the same atrocious pain of my first delivery, which we wanted to be a girl, not a boy. I feel like my husband is starting to act like my father and also my psychologist. This is a great awareness but it doesn’t serve me, practically, to avoid the cesarean. Do you think, with a psychomagic act, we can get the child to turn to the correct position?”

You recommended the following:

Ethan plays the role of his future brother. You, being the doctor, place him over the mother’s naked body, in the fetal position with the head up. Guiding the child with chocolates, turn the child over the stomach, slowly, delicately, until his head is turned down. Then you, Mrs., mimic the birth, having him slide softly between your legs. Before carrying out this act, find another name for your son.

I waited for my wife to find another name from deep within her. For three days, she looked for names very similar, phonetically, to Ethan. On the fourth day, she found it: Luke!

Finally, we were able to fulfill the act: Ethan seemed happy to play the role of his little brother. Mother and son were nude. I put my son on his mother’s stomach and began to give him chocolates while he delicately, slowly, with precaution, started turning himself around. He laughed and ate chocolates. After fifteen minutes, he was in the correct position and my wife mimicked an easy, agreeable, happy delivery. We said hello to our son, “Welcome to the world, Luke!” While hugging and kissing, our son ate his last and ninth chocolate.

The miracle! Little by little, the fetus turned, and when the big moment arrived, my wife gave birth in total serenity, without an epidural and without the slightest problem. Our doctor and the midwife were so amazed that they refused to charge us for their services.

107 PSYCHOMAGIC ACTIONS AND OUTCOMES

In all of the examples presented here, the consultants who fulfilled the psychomagic acts obtained the hoped-for result.

1. A woman has bad relations with men. Her conflict originates in the negative image that her mother gave her.

I recommended that she dress completely in her mother’s clothes and then talk to her lover as if she were her mother, repeating all the negative concepts she received in her childhood. I told her to let the words of hate, which her mother inoculated in her, arise in her mouth. After she insults her partner, she tears these clothes to pieces while screaming, “I am not her! I am capable of loving you!” She then sends the rags, smeared in honey, in a gift box to her mother.

2. A young woman gets extremely nervous when she drives a car and, because of this, she is forced to drive only rarely.

I recommended driving, dressed as a little girl, accompanied by her parents. Her mother should have a packet of candies and put one in her mouth every five minutes while her father, also every five minutes, should whisper in her ear, “Women drive better than men.”

3. A childless woman, who forgot the first eight years of her childhood, is afraid she has developed uterine cancer. She was born after her mother aborted the previous pregnancy at three months. The consultant’s father abandoned the home when the consultant’s mother was three months pregnant with her. She explains that her birth was not desired. Lacking individuality, she identified with her mother, and she feels possessed by the sacrificed fetus, which she feels has materialized into cancer.

I recommended that she fill a red bag with candies and go distribute them to the children in an orphanage. She then carries the bag for seven days with a kitchen knife painted black in it, and then hides it, after seven days, somewhere in her mother’s house without telling her.

The red bag represents her desires to live; the black knife, the mother’s wishes to abort her as she did with her brother. The guilt over having disobeyed by being born makes her create cancer, a tumor that represents when she was in the fetal state. All of this is returned to the parent.

4. A woman asks why she creates obstacles all the time. Through the Tarot, I explain to her that she reproduces the obstacles that her father put in her way. These difficulties, in the absence of affection (he wanted a boy not a girl), were the only thing that united her to him. The consultant confirmed the reading, revealing that she still keeps the father’s ashes in an urn.

I recommended that she dress as a man and go to a rugby game (a sport her father loved and to which he never wanted to take her), carrying the urn. She should watch the whole game and, at the end, empty the father’s ashes in the seat in which she was sitting. Then she should bury the man’s suit and plant an orchid over it.

5. A blind man cannot stand that his mother treats him like a handicapped child. He wants me to give him a psychomagic act to help him express his huge rage.

I recommended that he stand in front of his mother with a bull’s eye in each hand, screaming, “Look!” then he should throw the eyes at her and scream, “Eat them!” Then, putting a rock album on at high volume, he should undress and say, between laughter, “Now do you see! I am a man!”

6. A young woman can’t manage to have an orgasm with her lover. In general, she is afraid of men. Her father was assassinated by the mafia in Palermo.

I recommended that she enroll in a shooting club, then buy a pistol with which her lover masturbates her until she reaches orgasm. Then she buries the pistol with a photo of her father and a wedding ring.

7. An old man, crying, solicits an act that will get him out of the depression from which he has suffered for more than twenty years. He feels that his ex-wife, his daughter (now older), and his mother abuse him because, although they constantly ask him for money, they also won’t quit blaming him for ruining his marriage.

I recommended that he invite his ex-wife, his daughter, and his mother to dinner at his home. At the table, there will be three plates of black metal, without covers. He will put on each plate a whole, roasted chicken. He will take out a hammer and destroy the three chickens, screaming with frightening fury, “Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” Then he will present three containers filled with earth, ordering them to bury the pieces of chicken. Then he will give each one a flowering plant to plant in a pot. He will then tell them, “Get out of here! From now on, when you want to have dinner with me, you will have to pay the tab.”

8. A woman asks how she can make her father quit depending on her. He makes her responsible for all the dealings in the outside world while he waits for her at home, cleaning and cooking. I explain that she is living not as a daughter but as a wife to her father, a couple in which she has the role of the man and he has the role of the woman.

I recommended that she tell her father that she is going to give him a pair of handmade shoes and that, for these, he must take action: he has to stand on a sheaf of paper and draw the contour of his feet with a pencil. She gives these drawings to a master shoemaker so that he can concoct a pair of women’s shoes with tall heels. Once finished, she brings the shoes to her father saying, “I will continue to worry over you only if you use these shoes here in the house and also when you go out shopping or visiting your friends. If I am your man, you should assume the role of my wife.”

9. The consultant has a problem with his father: he despises him for being dirty. He is ashamed to tell his girlfriend that his father is a garbage man.

I recommended that he go to the girlfriend dressed in his father’s dirty clothes with his face stained with soot. He isn’t to speak as himself but as if he were his own father: “I have come to tell you something in the name of my son because he dared not confess it because he is ashamed of me. He didn’t want you to know that I am a dirty garbage man. With pleasure I will quit this job, but I need it to pay for his education. He loves you deeply. I should tell you he is a good boy, studious, intelligent, and at the base, he loves me as much as I love him. To end this problem, could you do me the favor of washing me?” Then he asks the girlfriend to undress him and wash him. Then, dressed in his own clothes (that he brought in a package), he will go with her to introduce her to his father.

10. The consultant is an osteopath interested in shamanism. His mother had cancer in the right knee. He believes this trouble has a psychological origin. At the death of her husband, she, clad in her widowhood because men have disappointed her, allows only her son to visit her. She doesn’t want to see any doctors. She demands that he cure her. He doesn’t know how to.

I recommended that he make a placebo surgery. He should buy a squid and then go visit his mother. He should then draw the curtains closed to prevent the light from entering and, with the house totally dark, light some candles and a lot of incense. He places his mother’s knee over a pillow, washes the knee with blessed water, compresses the squid forcefully against the cancer for at least ten minutes, and tells her, “This is your cancer; I am going to remove it.” The consultant takes a bladeless knife and mimics removing the squid-cancer with great difficulty. With his performance, he should convince his mother, and in this way, she will believe that he struggles mightily to remove her cancer. After an intense struggle, he rips out the squid-cancer. Then, lighting it with candles, he goes to the bathroom, accompanied by his mother, and shows her as he throws the “cancer” into the toilet bowl. She should flush the toilet. He gives her a very nice perfume so that each day she can spray perfume on her knee.

11. A consultant, a native of Barcelona and the daughter of very Catholic parents, suffers from a very solid fear of being assassinated. Through the Tarot, I explain to her that this fear is not of being murdered by some unknown but by herself because of her sexual desires. Her parents raised her for the order, hoping for an intact holy hymen.

I recommended that she stroll along the boulevards dressed as a nun, serendipitously giving each man a pornographic photograph: it will work just as well to buy one in the sex shop and photocopy it. After distributing one hundred photos, she sends the nun’s suit to her parents, accompanied by a box of one hundred condoms.

12. A fifty-year-old woman has a lot of difficulty asking for what she needs emotionally, especially of her partner (to whom she has been married for thirty years). Thanks to the Tarot, she remembers when she was little that she was interned in the hospital with tuberculosis and no relative visited her. She understands that this is the cause of the difficulty she has expressing herself to her partner.

I recommended that she, for whatever false motive, check herself into a private clinic early one morning. She waits, lying down, for her visitors. She expresses the pain of feeling abandoned. Four hours later, her husband arrives, bringing her flowers, chocolates, and a rag doll. He kisses her and puts a candy in her mouth, undresses her, rubs the doll all over her body, and then makes love to her. They then go from the clinic to a bar to get drunk and celebrate.

13. A woman has problems at work with her very aggressive boss. She says that her father would verbally attack her mother. She realizes that she has always established amorous relationships with aggressive men who pull her down and whom she ends up insulting until they feel insignificant.

I recommended an act that lasts two and a half months, always done anonymously. The first day of the first month, she enters her boss’s office when he is not there and leaves a little box of chocolates in his desk. Fifteen days later, she does the same thing but with a larger box of chocolates. The first day of the second month she again leaves an even bigger box of chocolates. Fifteen days later, she leaves another even larger box. Finally, in the middle of the third month, leaving the biggest box yet, she invents a way to surprise her boss. She gives him this explanation: “I realized my behavior toward you was aggressive.” From this point on, he will treat her better.

14. The consultant is a military pilot. During a battle, he was shot down and made prisoner. Since his return, he can’t stop being in conflict with his bosses because he believes they discount him. He is an instructor, and he doesn’t want to change his career or environment. He says see that his father was also a military pilot, but he was never taken prisoner. He realizes that because of this mishap, he feels that he has shamefully betrayed the trust his father placed in him.

I recommended that he should rent a small plane and take his whole family for a ride: his wife, son, and father (who should sit to his right). Fifteen minutes after takeoff, in midflight, his father should hug him, kiss him on the mouth, and pin a medal to his chest. This will persuade his unconscious that his father does accept him, and the consultant’s professional situation will get better.

15. A young man who, thanks to his mother, has studied piano since he was a child living in Barcelona works in something that he doesn’t like but that makes him a lot of money. He is afraid that if he dedicates himself entirely to music, he will die of hunger. His father would tell him, “If you are an artist, you will not earn enough money, and you will turn into a beggar!”

I recommend that he should go to La Rambla, the main street in Barcelona, with an electric piano and play for hours with a poster that reads: “I am not a beggar! Do not give me money! I play the piano for pleasure!”

16. A woman who has suffered with genital herpes for twenty years wants to know if it has a psychological cause and how to cure it. Reading her Tarot, I tell her that this illness is the consequence of sexual abuse. The consultant says this is what her therapist said after four years of work. The abuse, by her father, happened when she was still a baby.

I recommended that she, dressed as a baby, suck a lollipop while she makes love very delicately with her husband who wears an undershirt with her father’s face printed on it and his sex smeared with rose marmalade. They should repeat this experience for a week in order to calm and to satisfy the little girl inside her.

17. A young man (who never knew his father) is in love with an older man and has lived with this man, as his lover, for six months. The young man’s partner, discovering that he had been unfaithful, kicked him out, changed the locks, and promised that he would never unlock the door again. This made the young man sad. “What can I do to make him take me back?” the young man asked. I learned that the ex-lover’s birthday is in a month.

I recommended that he order two birthday cakes: a big one and a miniature one. On both cakes, a “70” (the lover’s age) will be written in sugar. Three days before his ex-lover’s birthday, the young man will take the smaller cake to his ex-lover’s house and leave it at his door with a card on which will be written, “This is a shrunken copy of the big cake that I will bring to you on your birthday. My love for you grows day by day.” If done this way, the young man will receive what he desires.

18. The consultants, a man and a woman, have been together for fifteen years. They began their relationship when they were very young. They do not live together, and they have no children. She is an only child and lives with her father, a widower. He is an only child, also, and lives with his mother, a widow. They realize this is the problem.

I recommended that in order to free themselves, they rent, in the greatest secrecy, a small apartment. In this love nest, they will meet often. They should make two medallions: for him, one with a photo of his mother that she will wear when they make love; for her, one with a photo of her father that he will wear when they make love. They keep track of how often they make love. After forty times, they bury the medallions in two separate pots and plant flowers over them. She gives her potted plant to her father, and he gives his to his mother. After this, they will find it easy to live together. They will always organize it so that when the mother visits, so does the father: the couple will refuse to see them separately.

19. A woman wants to find love and form a partnership, but she always finds men who won’t commit. She is conscious of the fact that she does everything possible to drive them away. We see that her mother, obsessively religious, has lived alone since giving birth to this woman and has never managed to find a partner.

I recommended that she go to a shop specializing in selling religious artifacts and buy a human-sized statute of a saint—Saint Pio, for example—which she will offer to her mother saying, “I had some irresistible desires to buy you this saint.” (With this, the unconscious, accompanied by “a man,” will overcome the prohibition and fulfill what the mother was unable to fulfill.)

20. The lower part of the body of the consultant’s father (now seventy-six years old) was paralyzed one month before the consultant’s birth. His mother (now sixty-nine years old) took care of him. A brother died of cancer when he was thirteen years old, one year before the consultant’s birth. The father, feeling guilty for the death of his son (perhaps because he wished for it), no longer wanted to live and castrated himself by way of his paralysis. The mother used the consultant for comfort and replaced the dead one with him, and the consultant feels sapped by his deceased sibling as well as fearful of being struck by cancer.

I recommended that he should learn how to make objects out of plastic or plaster. With his own hands, he should make a skeleton of a thirteen-year-old child. His brother played the electric guitar and wanted to play music and give concerts. Carrying the skeleton on his back, he attends a rock concert. Getting close to the stage, the consultant puts the skeleton at the feet of the musicians and, in this way, presents these fake bones as an offering to the musicians. Afterward, he visits his father, and turning the volume up to blast rock music, the consultant dances around naked in front of him. In the middle of this frenzy, he takes his father in his arms and says, “Dance with me, not with my brother!” After this, he accepts his obvious homosexuality and finds a lover, who he will introduce to his mother and father.

21. A young man with long hair sits in front of me and says nothing. I notice that he has very long nails on the left hand and very short nails on the right hand. The Tarot reading speaks of his duality. He feels on his right hand his masculinity and on his left hand his femininity. I think that his mother, through him, wanted to make him a perfect man who wanted what she was; whereas, as an introjection of his mother, he wanted to be the perfect woman. He is immersed in the conflict of not being a man or a woman.

I recommended that he sit on the terrace of a café and ask for peppermint schnapps (feminine green) and a grenadine (masculine red) and, drinking a little sip of one and then the other, observe the men and women passing, concentrating with total freedom only on their sexual energy. He will give himself the freedom to look, which will allow him to accept himself just as he is.

22. A consultant shows me a photograph of his mother so that she will heal from a persistent, infected wound that she has in the left hand. I explain that the left hand may symbolize the maternal grandmother and that if his mother cannot cure the infection it is because, although her mother (his grandmother) is already dead, the consultant’s mother still requests help from her mother: help that was given to her during childhood.

I recommended that his mother go to the cemetery and rub her infected hand, covered in honey, over the grandmother’s tomb or gravestone. Once this act is done, the wound will heal.

23. A very virile, rough-looking man, without wanting to specify much, says he has problems in his sexual life. I tell him, according to the cards he chose, that I think his father raped him when he was young. The consultant, bursting into tears, tells me, “It is a secret I’ve kept for years!” His father was a policeman.

I recommended that he should dress in a uniform similar to his father’s. Immediately after, he should dress in his wife’s clothes and have anal sex with her (with her approval beforehand). Then he should burn the uniform and the clothes, gather together the ashes, and spread them at the door of the police station.

24. The consultant is unable to form a partnership, having had a father who verbally abused her, saying, “You are a bitch!” She feels a deep aggression toward men.

I recommended that she go to a veterinarian to get the jaw of a deceased dog. Tearing out the teeth, she should make a collar that she should wear each time she leaves the house. This will allow her to express her rage symbolically and will change her attitude. She will give the collar to a man she likes.

25. A woman appears with a leather jacket that is too big for her. When I ask her who the garment belongs to, she says, “I bought it second hand but it looks like something of my father’s.” She says that when she was little, she was very bad, undisciplined and disrespectful, and threatened him with a knife. She was put in a correctional facility. She doesn’t have a career. She lives with the guilt. She wants to know how she can forgive herself.

I recommended that she take classes to learn to be a clown and then to go entertain children in the hospitals.

26. A light-skinned man of Haitian origin is dissatisfied with his body; he feels discriminated against, and he wants to change his identity. He is a musician.

I recommended that he should walk around in a busy part of the city in which he lives, with his body painted a pale color. Then sit on the terrace of a café and play a melody on his flute. Then he should return home and cover his skin with a very black makeup. He should repeat the above scenario, sitting again at the café and playing his song again. Finally, the third time, he should repeat everything, without paint, in his natural skin color.

27. A married man experiences violent back pains every night.

I recommended that he ask his wife to caress him, rubbing his back with the lips of her sex while singing a lullaby. After three of these “vagina massages” the pain will disappear.

28. A female consultant, who holds back enormous fury, wants to be rid of it. She had a domineering mother who, with rigid severity, forced the consultant, who had minor scoliosis, to wear a back brace from ages five to fifteen. This is the reason why the consultant lives repressing her femininity.

I recommended that the consultant buy a baseball bat, a back brace for children, and a box of chocolates in the shape of hearts. She then goes to see her mother to tell her, “Sit down. I am going to perform for you.” She gives her the chocolates to eat during the show in which the consultant violently beats the back brace with the bat, verbalizing all of the suffering guarded in her memory. Then the consultant should throw the back brace out the window, return to her home, paint the baseball bat gold, and hang it on the wall as an ornament.

29. A single, Jewish mother, for no apparent reason, has an enormous anxiety that her only son is going to die at the end of his thirteenth year. Through the Tarot, I tell her that she actually is not afraid of her son dying but that he will become an adult: that is to say, he will begin to have his own life, and he will sooner or later leave her and go away with his wife. The consultant adds that, after his birth, she wasn’t able to earn money like she was when she was a single woman.

I recommended that she organize a ritual to celebrate her son’s passage from child to adult. She should make sure ten men attend and that they each approach the young man with a $50 bill in their hands. One by one, they give him the bills, after each one shakes him as if to expel something from his body. And they continue like that until the boy has all ten bills. Then they congratulate him for being a man now. Now, alone with her son, she tells him, “They have given you $500. I want to make you a business proposition. I will add another $500. That way, you will have a thousand dollars to make a profitable business playing the stock market.”

30. A woman lives alone with her six-year-old son. She is separated from the son’s father, a successful businessman. After many lawsuits, he bought them a little apartment of about four hundred square feet. Taking advantage of this purchase, he stopped paying alimony. The consultant wants to know what she should do in order to obtain what is fair.

I recommended that she write a card to her ex-husband saying, “Your son is six years old, and he loves you very much. You know that we have to feed him well. I think you have a lot of problems with money because you ceased his child support. As I know you are a good human being, I am going to help you by sending you $50 per month. Forgive me, but it is what I can do at the moment in my stretched economic situation. You have been so generous with your son, and I want to help you until you solve your problems.”

31. A woman who knows the mediocre life she is living is no longer working realizes that she needs to leave everything and begin a new stage. But, due to inertia, fear, or an absurd feeling of responsibility, she can’t manage to break ties, and she asks me how to do this.

I recommended that she go to the main street in the city in a wheelchair and, one hour per day, for seven continuous days, whine bitterly. If people ask her why she is crying like that, she will respond, “Because I died yesterday!”

32. A man comes to consult me because each time he makes love, after ejaculating, he has pain in his penis. No doctor has been able to find a cause for this pain. Through the Tarot I see that in childhood, his mother, a religious fanatic, always told him that he would be a priest when he grew up.

I recommended that he go see his mother dressed as a priest and tell her, “I know now that I should end my sex life and become a priest. This, of course, makes you happy. But this hurts me.” Then he undresses and stands nude in front of her and says, “Look at this sex God gave me. Respect it and bless it because I am not a priest but a man who is going to give you grandchildren.” The consultant should convince her to accompany him to bury the suit and plant a small fruit tree over it.

33. A man says he was locked in a Turkish bath and risked scalding himself to death. Since this accident, he lives overwhelmed by a strange anxiety. Through the Tarot we see that he was born in the tenth month covered in a skin rash because of his lack of amniotic liquid. As the result of the difficult labor of his birth, his mother was ill for many years. They blamed him for having been too large to exit the cervix. This caused him to have a failure neurosis. The incident in the Turkish bath revived his initial anxiety.

I recommended that he go out on the street on foot-high stilts, dressed as a baby. He tells the people who look at him, “I am a big baby and this makes me happy!” Then he proceeds to distribute candies to children.

34. A man wants to know why, after having studied to be a healer, learning tai chi, do-in, acupuncture, and reiki, he decides not to practice it. We see through the Tarot that his parents didn’t pay attention to him (he was an abandoned baby), and he barely notices himself. He lacks faith.

I recommended that he should travel to Lourdes, France. When he gets six miles away from the grotto, he starts to cry and gathers his tears in a small glass. When he arrives at the grotto, he pours these tears into the sacred fountain and implores the Virgin, “Give me faith in myself!”

35. A man writing a theater piece has problems finishing the second act. He feels blocked. Each time he tries to advance, after writing a few pages, he is driven to tear them up and throw them in the garbage. Together with this creative block, he has problems defecating: he does so with difficulty every three days. Thanks to the Tarot we see that this is a childhood problem: his mother always complained of not being capable of having a second child. She lost every pregnancy. The consultant identifies with the mother, “aborting” his second act. Impeding his creating impedes his defecating.

I recommended that when he defecates he should clean himself with the white pages of his second act. Then he should write whatever he wants to, beginning on these soiled pages. Then he should put the pages in a leather box that he seals with red sealing wax. He will entrust this box to his mother saying, “I want you to keep this for me for nine months.” At the end of this time, the consultant recovers the box and buries it, planting two plants above it: one big one, the other small. If this is done, there will be no problem writing the second act or anything else.

36. A woman doubts the possibilities for success and cannot complete her projects. She has a complex because she looks like her father, but she is not a man. She overvalues the masculine power.

I recommended that she should buy a very feminine handbag and, from a sex shop, acquire a large phallus that she should paint gold. She should walk around town carrying this phallus in her handbag. Each time she goes to urinate, she takes out the phallus and crosses herself with it, reciting, “Our Mother who art in heaven, thy will be done here on Earth.” Then she puts the phallus in her handbag and tells it, “Quiet! You obey me!”

37. A lesbian cannot separate from her domineering mother.

I recommended that she should show handcuffs to her mother. Then, as a game, the consultant handcuffs herself to her mother. This way, wrist to wrist, the two shouldn’t separate for a whole day. As much as her mother might protest, become furious, exasperated, or cry, the consultant does not unlock the cuffs. At the end of the day, the consultant demands that her mother unlock the cuffs in the company of the whole family, at which time they greet the consultant’s beloved. Once in front of the whole family, carrying a large kitchen clock, the consultant and her beloved announce that they will kiss one another for ten minutes and that the family should let them know when the time is up. The lovers complete the task then distribute oval-shaped candies to everyone.

38. A well-built man arrives with a mastiff that he treats very sweetly. He teaches kendo (a kind of Japanese martial art fought with a sword). After many years of practice, he has obtained a seventh dan (a dan, or rank, is a scale of titles awarded to the practitioners). His greatest ambition is to obtain the eighth rank, which is the highest rank. For this, he must go to Japan. The official commission that grants these degrees requires enormous quality of its participants, but if the person who solicits this rank is a foreigner, the tests he or she is required to undergo are virtually impassable. He asks me for a psychomagic act in order to pass the tests.

I recommended that he should put his wisdom to practice and that he split his dog in two in his training room. He left without saying a word. At the end of a week, he returned (as is customary), accompanied by his dog. He thanked me, saying, “I realized that, for all these years, I have practiced kendo only for the pleasure of combat and not so they will give me any honorary titles. Having diminished my desires to obtain the eighth dan, I didn’t need to murder this poor dog.”

39. A young man, accompanied by his lover, feels like a prisoner because his mother, whenever he is absent, emotionally blackmails him with a crying spell. He wants to go live with his beloved, but he can’t separate from his mother. His father was run over by a car. Since then, as the only son, he has lived with his widowed mother. She holds him prisoner, fearing that the accident will be replicated.

I recommended that he park his car in front of his house and honk the horn excessively until his mother appears in the window. He sprays himself with three gallons of fake blood and lies under the car, leaving his head and arms out. He screams, “I am not my father! I will not die like him because I love a woman!” He should then get up, get in his car (where his lover waits for him), and, still bloodied, begin to make love to her. Afterward, they get out of the car and go into the house. He introduces his lover to his mother, saying, “This is my girlfriend. Bless us because we are going to get married!”

40. A pianist, with a baby voice and childish movements, wants to compose songs but can’t manage to develop his creativity. Because his mother hates men, he (so that she won’t hate him) acts like an asexual child. He must understand that creativity is closely aligned with sexual energy.

I recommended that he should burn a photograph of his mother, take a pinch of the ashes, and dissolve it in a glass of milk to drink. Then he should masturbate while hitting the piano keys with his phallus, ejaculating and smearing his sperm on them.

41. A woman whose parents fight all the time doesn’t know how to quit being verbally aggressive. Each time a man tries to seduce her, she covers him in insults.

I recommended that she should buy (in a gag shop) plastic teeth and then wear them. She goes to a café and sits on the terrace with a bowl of yogurt and honey. Taking a pair of pliers from her handbag, she theatrically begins a painful fight to remove the false teeth. After three huge efforts and cries, they are extracted. Then she caresses her gums, teeth, tongue, and the roof of her mouth with the honey-yogurt. Following this, she takes a walk and kisses the first man who looks kindly at her.

42. A man who has a beautiful voice and who dreams of dedicating himself to theater cannot do it because he suffers with a debilitating timidity that prevents him from speaking in public.

I recommended that he should make a two-foot-long tube, paint it, varnish it, change it into a beautiful object, and, carrying the tube, go to a museum of modern art dressed like an angel (white tutu, a mane of blonde hair, a pair of wings). He then requests that a museum visitor allow him to whisper something very beautiful in the visitor’s ear—clarifying that it is not for money but to cultivate his art. With the visitor’s consent, he puts the tube to the visitor’s ear and recites a poem into it from the other side. He should repeat this with as many visitors as possible. At the end of the day, the consultant will feel accepted. He will have overcome his timidity.

43. A woman confesses that ten years ago her boyfriend raped her. She didn’t defend herself and let him do what he wanted. She never wanted to see him again. After this, she hasn’t had an emotional or a sexual life. I asked her the boyfriend’s name. “Alberto.” “And your father?” “Alfonso.” I have her notice how both names begin with the same letter. In her unconscious is the impression of having been raped by her father. This provokes a feeling of guilt because it reveals her incestuous wishes.

I recommended that a friend should wait for her in a public park on a bench, wearing a mask made with a photo of the father’s face. She should arrive dressed as a little girl. She should sit on the ground in front of him and tell him, “Daddy, I should confess something: I wanted to be your girlfriend and marry you. I wanted you to throw yourself on top of me and possess me just like you do with Mama. I was a little girl. Forgive me.” The friend should say, “I understand you, and I forgive you.” Then, disguised that way, they should go to a café and have a refreshing drink and pastries. Then she will bury the mask of her father and the little girl costume and plant a rosebush.

44. A man, though he has lived many years in another country to be far away from his invasive mother, still feels her presence in his mind, preventing him from finding a partner and starting a family.

I recommended that he buy a plastic cord and wind it around his waist four times. At the end of the cord, he should attach a photograph of his mother. He should wear it like that for four days, during which time he should not bathe. At the end of this time, he sends the cord and the photograph to her by mail along with scissors and a card that reads: “Those who take back lied when giving. Thank you for having given me life.”

45. A consultant feels depressed after receiving an insulting and threatening card.

I recommended he wrap the card in raw meat and toss it onto an anthill.

46. An artist/painter feels like he is not the social character others think he is. He feels like he doesn’t have anything to say and that none of his paintings are sincere and that he only paints to sell or to receive applause from snobbish people. He hates his way of life. He wants to turn into a real man.

I recommended that he should prepare ten masks with ten photographs of his face. Before wearing them—one after the other—he makes his face up as a skull. He goes out masked like this to ten places. Each time he goes to one of these places, he removes the mask, breaks it into little pieces, and tosses it like rain over a child’s head. After destroying nine masks, he returns home and destroys the tenth one in front of a mirror, where he will contemplate his skull face for one hour. Then he will remove the makeup, throw his paintings out the window, change his name, and send out a newsletter to everyone he knows, telling them that the painter D (the consultant’s name) has died and that the human being E (the consultant’s new name) has been born.

47. A man tells of a trauma with his mother: she terrorized him, hitting him on the head with a rolled-up newspaper. In spite of being thirty years old, he is still afraid of her. I asked him what kind of newspaper his mother reads. He said, “A newspaper about the livestock industry. She wanted to have a ranch and raise cattle.”

I recommended that he should go a cattle ranch, choose a cow, look deeply into her eyes, and release his anger by insulting her loudly while throwing a dozen raw eggs at her head. Then the consultant should mail a dozen raw eggs (placed in a beautiful box and well protected by cotton balls) to his mother.

48. A Korean woman feels that her life stagnated five years ago when she separated from her husband. She is a stylist in the fashion industry, and she wants to know what she has to do in order to evolve.

I recommended that she create double models: for heterosexual, homosexual, and lesbian couples and also for a woman and her dog, a mother and her child, a grandfather and his grandson, two friends, and so forth. She should go from making ready-to-wear costumes to making specialty costumes (not equal but complementary).

49. A woman complains that her father despises women. For years he has repeated, “I cannot stomach these ignorant females.” She is tired of wanting to prove to her father that she is intelligent. She wants an act to get free from him so she can do what she wants to do.

I recommended, on the first day of her period, that she invite her father to dinner. At the end of the dinner, she makes him drink four drops of menstrual blood dissolved in a glass of cognac. The second day of her period, she writes what she wants to do on a piece of paper and wraps it around a tampon, which she inserts into her vagina. At the end of a few hours, she buries the paper in a pot, over which she will plant a flowering plant. The third day of her period, she sends this potted plant to her father as a gift.

50. A man has warts on his anus and emotional problems with his lover who cheated on him. He doesn’t want to separate from him, but he feels like he cannot forgive him. We see that his father, now dead, never knew of his homosexuality.

I recommended that he should go to the cemetery and rub his anus, smeared with honey, over his father’s tomb saying, “Father, I am homosexual. Bless me.” Then he must buy from a butcher the sex of a bull with the testicles, put them in a plastic bag, and tie this to his lover’s genitals. With a kitchen knife, screaming out his pain, jealous with rage, he cuts the bag’s cord. He throws the bull’s genitals on the floor and rips them to shreds. Then he and his lover kiss and hug, gather the pieces, and bury them, sealing the “tomb” with a beautiful and very heavy rock.

51. A man wants an act that will help him open his heart. He feels unable to love, but he doesn’t want to delve into the psychological reasons causing this pessimism.

I recommended that he should dress up as a Buddhist monk and paint his face blue. He paints the right hand gold, the left hand silver. He goes out this way to walk down a very busy street, both hands supported on his chest as he recites, “I want to love, I can love, I should love and accept the changes love produces in me.” He smiles at all the women who pass.

52. A young Jewish woman wishes to be independent from her family, but she feels guilty.

I recommended that she should put three $100 bills inside a Hebrew Bible along with a photograph of her family. She then goes to the synagogue and leaves the Bible there, whispering, “I am paying for everything you have given me. I leave this here and freely follow my path.”

53. A woman of forty wants to know why the company she created doesn’t work. She has an emotional problem: she feels that her late husband wants her to fail because he is unhappy. She feels like his prisoner.

I recommended that she should go to the cemetery where her husband is buried, carrying a photograph of him that she glues to his gravestone with her saliva. She says, “I understand why you are disgusted with me: you don’t like that I buried you here. I will take you where you want to rest.” She takes the photograph and carries it to the deceased’s city of birth. She goes to the cemetery in that city and looks for a grave of someone who shares the same first name or initials as her husband, and there she glues with honey the photograph to this person’s gravestone. She will feel free.

54. A young, attractive homosexual complains that he can’t find lovers. He has lost his left hand, which has given him a complex.

I recommended that he should stop hiding his artificial hand, which is an ugly imitation, and that he should paint it silver and wear a fancy ring on every finger. The ring for the middle finger should include a red stone.

55. A woman feels imprisoned in a psychic fortress. She doesn’t trust any man because four people from her school raped her when she was seventeen.

I recommended that she should carry out an act with four male therapists. She should dress up the way she was dressed when she was raped. The four men attack her, trying to knock her down. She defends herself. When she is about to be overtaken, with enormous authority, she throws out an order, as if she were speaking to dogs, “Fall down!” They fall down and remain there, quietly. She walks around them, caressing their bosoms, and tells them, “Now, come! I want you!” They get up and tenderly approach her. She puts a piece of sausage in each of their mouths. Looking into their eyes, she places in their hands the previously agreed-upon amount of money for their professional intervention and tells them, “Thank you for everything.” Later, she buries the costume she wore for the act and plants a creeper over it.

56. A man who never had financial problems, due to belonging to a wealthy family, feels that he is not anchored in reality. He sees himself as too visionary and is afraid of going crazy. He lives in Paris.

I recommended that he should go to a building with no fewer than five floors and that he should tell the doorman that the department of architecture at a university sent him over to measure the stairs with absolute exactness because he must clean them. He will give the doorman a tip for allowing him to do this. On his knees with a feather duster, he will clean the steps of all five floors. Then he will repeat this in another six buildings: one per week.

57. A man has emotional problems: he is very aggressive and domineering with his wife. He feels guilty. When he was a child, his mother was excessively severe.

I recommended that he should put honey on his wife’s feet and lick it off entirely. He should repeat this action for seven consecutive nights.

58. A woman, a poet, says she is unable to know her soul. She suffers because her parents (theater artists) wanted a boy, not a girl.

I recommended that she should go visit her parents dressed as a man. She tells them to sit in front of her because she wants to carry out a metamorphosis in front of them. Following some musical rhythm, she performs a striptease, as slowly as possible. Once she is naked, she opens the lips of her sex and takes from her vagina a small quartz crystal rock. She then tells them, “Look at my soul, finally!” She puts the little rock in her mouth and swallows it. She makes them help her dress herself up as a woman.

59. A woman lives in anguish over the suicide of her father. Her mother, a woman with schizophrenic tendencies and the personality of an ogre, made her father’s life unbearable; he couldn’t take any more abuse from her. He took the car, left the house, and was found in the river. He had taken pills to kill himself. The consultant feels guilty for not intervening and letting her mother morally destroy him.

I recommended that she put caramel candies in a jar with a skull label on it. She goes by car to the river of her father’s suicide. She swallows all of the “pills.” Then she puts her index finger down her throat until she vomits. From the vomit, she takes out the “pills” and puts them in a beautiful little bag. Then she gives them to her mother, knowing that she will devour them because she loves caramel candies!

A month after this act, I received a card that said, “When I saw my mother eat the ‘pills’ that I had vomited up, I started shivering, and then I felt the feeling of total liberation. Finally, I had found the spiritual peace I lacked.”

60. A man who has a slight stutter experiences pain in his jaw muscle, the masseter. When he was a child, his younger brother suffered from mastoiditis and needed all of his parents’ attention. He reproduces this pain, unconsciously, to attract attention.

I recommended that he, in the morning for six days, glue to the side of the jaw in pain a one- by two-inch label on which his brother’s name is written. He will keep this label on at all times, doing all of his laborious activities. If someone asks why he is wearing the label, he will respond without further explanation, “Because I have a problem.” During the night, he will remove the label and bury it in a pot to which he will have glued a picture of his parents. At the end of the week, he will plant lavender in this pot.

61. A man says he has continuous bad luck: all of the businesses he starts fail. He was adopted as a child. His father convinced him to go into the navy when he turned seventeen. His bad luck started when he resigned. His now dead father wanted to be a sailor with all the homosexual imagery that implies.

I recommended that he should buy a model warship similar to those on which he served. Once armed with the ship, he should go to visit his father’s grave site dressed in uniform as an official sailor. Once there, he removes his uniform and places it on the gravestone along with the boat and a plastic phallus. He says, “Enough! Quit cursing me! So that you can fulfill your dreams, I am giving you my uniform, a boat, and a phallus. Now, allow me to fulfill my dreams.”

62. A filmmaker (of only short films) can’t manage to make a feature film. This block has lasted for twenty-five years. This has happened to him because of his complex about having a small penis.

I recommended that he should get in touch with a special effects artist and hire this person to make a plastic penis about twenty inches long into which the consultant can insert his own member. He should wear this artificial penis supported by the length of his right leg when he goes to a meeting with any producer. This will give him the confidence in himself that he needs in order to convince them to produce a feature film.

63. A man on whose genealogy tree there are many people who committed suicide, among them his father, wants to have a loving relationship with his family (with the seven people left) in order to free himself from depression.

I recommended that he should go to see these seven living relatives carrying a water gun. He shoots a jet of water in each of their faces and laughs while doing so like a bad boy.

64. A woman, raised in a fanatical Catholic family who inculcated her with the idea that sex belongs in marriage and never for pleasure, cannot achieve orgasm with her lover. She always speaks in a very quiet voice, repressing her desires to insult or maybe to kill.

I recommended that she should make love with her lover at midnight and scream for five minutes like a savage beast imitating a cosmic orgasm, so intense that she wakes up all the neighbors. At the same time she should tear a Bible apart. Having done this, the woman should pick up all the torn pages and make a ball with them, gluing them together with honey, and then send it to her maternal grandmother.

65. A man loses more money than he earns anytime he invests in any project. His father was a laborer and a Sicilian immigrant. I asked him how much he was willing to invest to cure himself. He responded, “$500.”

I recommended that he should buy a Sicilian hat and wear it for six days with a $500 bill underneath it, over his hair. Then he should go see his father and give him the hat as a present, leaving the money in it and saying, “These things belong to you.” In this way, the consultant will return his father’s concept of money and free himself.

66. For three years, a woman’s gums bleed. She recalls that her mother had a similar problem. We see that, thanks to this illness, the consultant, whose father did not love her, identifies with her mother and, in this way, expresses her unfulfilled, incestuous childhood wishes toward her father.

I recommended she carry a photograph of her mother in her bra, go see her father, and say, “Hug and kiss me on the mouth!” He, who has always rejected her, will refuse to do so. So she takes out the photograph of her mother, rubs it on her bleeding gums, and throws it in her father’s face, telling him, “This illness belongs to you! I’m giving it back!”

67. A woman, whose father committed suicide by shooting himself in the throat when she was eleven, always pairs up with men who quit loving her suddenly and then leave her.

I recommended that she go to her father’s grave site with a pistol equipped with a silencer and shoot a bullet into his tombstone. Then she says, “Take this. I extract this bullet from my life to give it back to you.” She leaves the pistol and a jar of honey at his grave.

68. A young man, a guitarist, feels like he is going to lose his creativity and is afraid of losing the love of his mother (a guitarist, too, but unsuccessful). We see that he is condemned to failure through the guilt he feels for fulfilling what his mother could not do. She unconsciously prohibits success.

I recommended he ask his mother to invite him to dinner. He arrives earlier than expected. While she cooks, he offers to clean her guitar. He closes himself in a room, takes off his underpants, and carefully rubs them against the maternal guitar. He puts the underwear in a bag, and later, without washing them, he uses them to rub against his own guitar wherever he plays a show. In this way, he will have robbed permission to succeed from his mother.

69. A woman, to give value to her feminine creativity, has fulfilled the psychomagic advice of taking a stroll with seven gold coins in her vagina. Having put them somewhere in the house, she has forgotten where and can’t find them.

I recommended she should call her father and convince him to help her look for the coins because he caused her lack of self-esteem.

70. A man, a musician, loves playing his cello, but his family, all in business, pays him no attention because he earns very little money. He would like them to quit laughing cruelly at him and understand him.

I recommended that he should invite all of his relatives to dinner. He should buy a used cello. At the end of dinner, he announces, “Now dessert!” He brings out his cello, puts it on the table, and destroys it with a hammer. Then he puts pieces of the cello on each guest’s plate and pours acacia honey over them, while saying: “This is what you all wanted. Now eat the pieces of my dream.” Then the consultant takes out his own cello and gets on top of the table and plays the musical passage he likes most, allowing those who are leaving, offended, to leave. The consultant cuts off relations with them and only continues seeing those who remain.

71. An older woman is not happy in her marriage. She would like to divorce but something prevents her. She wants an act to help her find equilibrium. I ask her what is the place she would most like to visit. She answers, “Greenland!”

I recommended she buy a ticket to Greenland. Without consulting her husband, she should go for fifteen days. Then return. During her absence, she should sleep with the first man who propositions her.

72. A white-skinned woman cannot stop scratching her face (sometimes until it bleeds). We see that her mother, married to a black-skinned man, was unfaithful with a white-skinned man.

I recommended that she should paint her whole face black with makeup and go see her mother to tell her, “This is the way you always wanted to see me because you feel guilty about being unfaithful to your husband! Give me back my face!” She should take her mother to the bathroom and make her mother wash her face. This done, she will persuade her mother to kiss her all over her face.

73. A man lives with a woman who, suffering excesses of rage, won’t stop violently insulting him. An equally angry woman brought up the consultant: a mother who endlessly insulted him.

I recommended that he, for twenty-eight days, should write on adhesive labels all the insults they say. Then pack all these labels together to form a ball. He takes his wife by the throat, rubs the ball on her lips, and screams, “I love you!” Then he sends by mail this jumble of labels to his mother.

74. A man firmly believes that he was a victim of sexual abuse when he was a child. But he doesn’t remember anything. He very often feels like vomiting. He represses a tremendous anger toward a man in his family. Which one?

I recommended that he put on the floor in his bedroom a photo of each male relative. (He has two brothers, a father, three uncles, and a grandfather.) Next, as it is very likely that he was forced to swallow semen, the consultant should drink a gallon of milk and wait for the sensation to vomit to arrive. His body, independent of his mind, will choose the predator’s photo through the vomit.

75. A woman wants to reconcile with her father who, before dying, sent her a letter full of insults and reproaches.

I recommended that she should go to the cemetery and give her father’s tomb ferocious lashes, burn the letter there, and, finally, paint on the tomb with a brush soaked in honey the word love.

76. A woman who is an actress and tourist guide feels that everything seems difficult. She wants to find the pleasure to be alive. She feels that her mother never gave her anything.

I recommended that she should buy eight quail eggs and hard-boil them, then write on their shells the word mother and swallow them one at a time without chewing them. She then should drink two liters of milk and vomit in a toilet. She buries the vomit in a pot where, afterward, she plants a hydrangea. Then she sends a letter to her mother saying, “Thank you for having given me life.”

77. A woman thinks her parents didn’t want her to be born. They never gave her the means to develop herself. She complains, “They have killed my life! No one sees me. Everyone despises me.”

I recommended that she should hire a marble mason to make a marble headstone with her name and birthdate on it, a dash, and then her birthdate again (for example, 1985–1985) to symbolize that she died when she was born. Then, for seven days, she takes a walk on the street with the headstone attached to her back in such a way that all the curious people can read the inscription. Afterward, with a hammer, she reduces the marble to dust, gathers the dust, puts it in an urn, and then scatters it in the sea.

78. A woman suffers because her parents criticize her sexual life. Every time they feel her enthusiastic about a man, they treat her like they would a prostitute. So each time she sees them, she adopts a childish attitude. What can she do to assert herself in their presence?

I recommended that she should invite them to dinner in a restaurant. She arrives late and with a friend dressed as a gorilla, whom she introduces to her parents as her boyfriend, and then tells them, “I already paid the bill. You will have to eat without me. I am leaving right now because I’m dying to fuck this monkey.” Then she leaves, embraced by the big animal.

79. A married woman feels overwhelmingly dominated by her husband. She is convinced that men have more power than women. What does she have to do to feel superior to him?

I recommended that she should give him a glass of very good quality wine into which she has poured a drop of her blood. She does this for ten days (each time, the drop of blood will be extracted from a different finger).

80. A woman has had heartburn ever since her mother told her that due to suffering from unbearable vomiting attacks while pregnant she wanted to abort her.

I recommended that she should drink a liter of milk each night, and then vomit into a carafe through a funnel. She does this for nine nights in a row, then sends it to her mother, who is very superstitious and believes in the power of witches. This vessel, with the cork sealed with wax, is accompanied by a card that reads, “This carafe contains water blessed by a shaman. If you bury the contents in your garden, all the plants will grow with exuberance.”

81. A woman has enormous difficulties earning money. In her family, the women have been undervalued. Her grandparents, who were very wealthy, in order to affirm their sons’ virile power only gave them the right to earn money working: the women were to dedicate themselves to the home and receive a weekly allowance from their husbands.

I recommended that she should go to the cemetery and glue with honey a $100 bill on the gravestones of each grandparent and say, “This is the money that you forced me to take! I am giving it back to you! Now I am going to earn my own working in what I want to!” Then she will leave without looking back.

82. A woman, mother of four, in spite of the fact that her husband provides generously for her, wants to leave everything and go to a deserted island to write a book. She knows it is a dream, but she wants to find the way to fulfill this dream.

I recommended that she design a room in her home that is exclusively for her where no one else, not even her children or her husband or the assistant, can enter. There, she will have only a desk, a chair, and a thick notebook. Every day, at six in the morning, she will get up and shut herself in this room for an hour to write her book, seated with her feet placed in a basin full of sand.

83. A woman with no psychoanalysis culture feels confused. Her father died of a heart attack when she was twelve years old. She idealized him. No other man could take his place. Without knowing why, this love made her feel guilty.

I recommended (in order to become aware of the repressed incest wish) she should go to the church to confess. During the confession, she tells the priest, “Father, I am here because I am in love with you, and I want you to make love to me. We will have a baby as beautiful as Jesus.” Then she should lift her skirt and urinate in this space. I promised her that if she did this, she would no longer feel confused.

84. A woman has felt attracted to a man. They have seen one another many times without ever making love. This has lasted for five years. She thinks he, feeling insanely timid and being a romantic, will label her an “easy” and shameless woman and not see her again if she proposes to him that they sleep together. What to do?

I recommended that she buy a small turquoise stone and go to him and say, “I have consulted a medium and was told that we were, in another life, a couple. So that we recover our memory, I should give you this pebble but only passing it from my mouth to yours.” If he accepts, this kiss will actually bring the two closer. If he refuses, she should forget him.

85. A woman always pairs with men who abandon her shortly after the relationship starts. This recycles the relationship she had with her father who committed suicide at fifty when she just turned fifteen. Her mother occupied all of the space of the disappeared. Between them they have raised her two little brothers who are today ten and twelve. She realizes that, in order to be faithful to her father, she makes the excuse to seek men who will not jeopardize the relationship she has with her mother. How to be free of this?

I recommended that she put, on the Internet, an ad saying a young woman of twenty-nine seeks to have only one fiery encounter with a depressed married man who has one daughter of fifteen and two small boys. When this fifty-year-old man appears (don’t try to verify if this is true), she must call him Roberto (her father’s name) and make love to him and whisper the whole time, “Goodbye, good-bye, good-bye.”

86. A short, skinny man with scoliosis complains that his “elders” don’t take care of him. His father is a librarian, and his mother works in a bookstore. He wants to be a great writer, but he fears that he won’t be able to live up to the literary demands of his parents (both failed writers).

I recommended that he should walk with a backpack full of books for thirty-one miles. Then he burns these books and, afterward, goes to visit his “elders” and puts a handful of ashes in his father’s hand and another handful in his mother’s hand, saying, “This is your dead books! I am going to birth a living one!”

87. A woman works in a circus as a clown. She doesn’t manage to do it with happiness. In spite of making kids laugh, she feels sad. Something is missing. We see that she left her family when she was eighteen. Her father wanted her to be an attorney. She preferred the circus life. He quit speaking to her for a long time.

I recommended that she should go to her father dressed as a clown to tell him, “Accept that I will never be an attorney. Because of your criticisms, I have not been able to do my work well. I am asking that you be so kind as to make a small sacrifice for me. I want you to come see my performance, dressed and made up as a clown, and you sit in a corner so that I can be sure that you support me with your love.” If she manages to convince him of this, she will discover the ecstasy of acting.

88. A woman has osteoarthritis, which is considered abnormal because she is young. Her maternal grandmother had an immense need for affection because she had been abandoned in an orphanage. Complaining that no one loved her, she enslaved the consultant’s mother, asking continuously for massages in the parts of the body where the bones had atrophied. She grew up thinking that her grandmother received care and attention from her mother thanks to a sick skeleton. For this reason, in order to also attract maternal attention, she created osteoarthritis.

I recommended that she should buy a human-sized, plastic skeleton and sleep with it for seven days. Then go to the cemetery and leave it there over the grandmother’s grave saying, “I am returning your bones and your pain.”

After fulfilling this act, her suffering disappeared; it briefly reappeared when she argued with her partner and felt abandoned.

89. A woman who sings very well cannot appear in public because she can’t take the prying eyes. Her parents are not interested in what she does.

I recommended that she sing through a beautiful ventriloquist doll that she designs. She should do that four times. The fifth time, she does it without the doll but dressed like the doll. Then she goes to visit her parents and persuades them to sit together and let her tie them up. She sings to them, undressing little by little, until she is nude. She takes the doll from the suitcase, sings through it a few measures, and then makes it talk, “I am a doll that your daughter had to employ in order to sing in public because you two do not show any interest in her art and she, therefore, feels invisible.” The consultant tears the doll apart, gets dressed, and unties her parents. If they are not moved by this act, the consultant should not see them again.

90. A woman and a man who live together and smoked marijuana for ten years no longer feel stable now that they have quit. They feel that they lack roots in reality.

I recommended that they buy, on credit, around-the-world airplane tickets. In each city they visit, they should hammer a thick nail into a street.

91. A woman who works as a secretary wants to change careers. She would like to make jewelry and lamps, but she doesn’t dare do it because her parents always told her she had very bad artistic taste.

I recommended that she make a brooch, trying to make it as ugly as possible, and an equally horrible lamp. She should give the brooch to her mother and the lamp to her father. She should tell them, “Admire the object I can make!” With this act the consultant will lose the desire for their approval. She will feel free to do what she wants.

92. A man has social complexes. He has desires to fulfill himself artistically as a sculptor but he doesn’t feel he has the right to do so. He belongs to a family of bricklayers: his grandfather and his father and him, as well.

I recommended he put twenty bricks in a pile and then destroy them by shooting them with a pistol. Then bury the pieces of brick together with an eagle made of plaster that he has sculpted.

93. A woman lives in constant anger because her mother ruled the house, and her father was not virile enough to put her in her place. Both are now dead.

I recommended that she should go to a toyshop with a large childhood photo of herself on her chest. She should buy the largest doll she can find. She goes to the cemetery and leaves this photo on her father’s grave, gluing it with honey and saying, “This is how I was when I needed a father. You were the only child, and I loved you as if you were my little brother.” Then she will go to her mother’s grave and strike the tombstone furiously with the doll. When the consultant has released all of her rage, she will say, “You too were a little girl. You were a tyrant in order to hide your weakness. I adopt you as a daughter.” Then she buries the doll and plants a palm tree over it.

94. An actress says she is heterosexual but feels a powerful masculine force within her. We see that her father had homosexual tendencies. She, due to her childhood incest urges, is manly so he will like her. Now an adult, she has always rejected forming a partnership, in spite of innumerable adventures. What to do in order to decide to start a family?

I recommended she create a one-woman show dressed as a pregnant man. She should explain to the public what it feels like for a man to gestate a child. This way she unites the childhood urges with the desire to love and to be a mother. She invites her father to the premiere.

95. A Parisian woman, whose Catholic grandparents raised her and instilled in her that sexual pleasure is a sin, feels that living in her body is forbidden and she only lives as a refugee in her head.

I recommended that she hire a carpenter to make a cangue for her. With this Chinese instrument of torture, she imprisons the neck and wrists, separating the head and the hands from the body, and goes to Notre Dame with a male friend who knows what the consultant likes. In front of the statue of the Virgin, the friend removes the cangue, and the consultant leaves it there at the saint’s feet. She then asks her friend to go with her to a hotel room close by that will have previously been reserved. Once there, he blindfolds the consultant and proposes to make love to her.

96. A woman has suffered all of her life watching her parents argue and insult one another or she has endured days passed in their purposeful silence.

I recommended that she go visit her parents and tell them that she suffers because she saw them separated all of her life. This separation prevented her from starting a family. If they want to be grandparents one day then they will have to face one another and put their feet together. The consultant circles them several times with a cord, tying them up. While she does this, she expresses all the anxiety she felt as a young girl. Finally, she tells them, “Like this, I love you! United forever!” She leaves, but she leaves them tied together.

97. A man says he feels his family like a heavy rock on his shoulders. His older sister died of breast cancer; his father, who never speaks, lost an eye; his mother suffers from epilepsy; and there has been sexual abuse. I discovered that the paternal grandfather, a farmer, caused all of this. He forced everyone to carry his or her own weight in order to cost him less, so he could spend as little as possible on the members of his family.

I recommended that he buy a pair of boots, defecate in them, and then throw them on his grandfather’s grave, exclaiming, “From this moment on, I am free of you!”

98. A woman with a limp lives possessed by an overwhelming sadness. She got polio when she was eighteen months old. Her parents didn’t have her vaccinated; they never bothered with her. They belonged to families that, due to every kind of problem, did not know the happiness of life.

I recommended that she look for a dried-out tree and nail into it pictures of all of her relatives along with a picture of herself as a child with her crutches. She then sets this tree ablaze and gathers up the ashes and dissolves them in a liter of blessed water. With this paste, she covers her whole body and sleeps like this. The morning after, she washes it off. Her sadness will have dissolved.

99. A woman is very annoyed because, for three years, her neighbor—one floor below her—makes unbearable noises during the night. I ask her what important event happened there years ago. She responded, “My mother died, a domineering woman and one of very bad character.” We see that the neighbor below, a psychiatrist, represents the archetype of this invasive mother, a loved and hated mother who the consultant doesn’t want to let go.

I recommended that each time she hears an annoying noise, she should find the central place in the floor from which the noise emerges and place there a photograph of her mother. The next morning, the consultant should slide this photograph, with a black ribbon attached to it, under the neighbor’s door. She repeats this action with photocopies until the neighbor comes up to ask what’s going on. Being a psychiatrist, she will understand the problem and stop being noisy.

100. A woman, who in a few days will be thirty-six, complains that her life has not been easy; she doesn’t have a partner, or work, or family, or material goods. She wants an act that gives her strength to begin a new cycle.

I recommended that on her birthday she buy thirty-six nails, the biggest she can find. Carrying a hammer, she is to go to a place with hard earth and hammer the thirty-six nails there in such a way to make a star with five points. Afterward, she defecates on top while eating a red apple.

101. I received this card from Buenos Aires, Argentina:

I am a worker employed by a travel agency and now very depressed from illness. They have removed three carcinomas from my left breast. I believe that one of the main motives is the internal conflict with my mother: a cold, distant, unloving, egotistical, frivolous, childish woman. What can you advise me?

I responded:

You say your mother is cold, distant, unloving, egotistical, frivolous, childish. You should ask why? You will find the awful problem she had with her own father. He probably wanted her to be a boy, which causes the female offspring to act like a failed man. The breasts are called “mamman.” If we remove an “n” we turn the word into “mama.” These carcinomas are not yours; they are your mother’s. Denounce your hate and let her breast-feed. You have to paint a bocce ball black, carry it in a bag next to the left breast, removing it only to bathe or to sleep. At the end of this time, send this heavy ball of steel to your mother with a card that says, “I return this to you; it’s yours.” Then you should find a woman who is nursing and ask her to let you nurse once per day for a week. Nurse with a pillow on your stomach, disguising yourself as a pregnant woman.

102. I received this card from Santiago, Chile:

At the beginning of this year, I fell into a depression that submerged me in terrible anxiety. . . . I feel that I can’t go on. My body is heavy; I go around sad most of the time; I change my mind all day long; I am very sensitive; I perceive the negative things that people think. The two things that keep me going in life are writing or being with my boyfriend.

I responded:

To get out of this depression, for seven Fridays in a row, go into your bathroom and take off all of your clothes and, starting with the feet, let your boyfriend cover your whole body (including the head and hair) in acacia or chestnut honey. When totally covered, he should caress your entire body—breasts, sex, even the anus, and also the soles of the feet—and then lick the breasts but leave part of the honey on the breast in the shape of a heart. He will pass the mirror over you so you can see the heart. Then wash yourself with warm water. Once cleaned and dried, get dressed in new clothes (shoes, dress, pantyhose, underwear) and go with him to a café to drink tea and have dessert. Don’t wear the new clothes the next day: save them for the next Friday. At the end of this series of seven Fridays, tell your friends and relatives to call you by another name: a name that you alone should come up with without any help from anyone. After this, wear the new clothes whenever you want to.

103. I received this card from Guadalajara, Mexico:

I consulted with you because my eldest daughter of twenty was going through a very harsh crisis: she was always depressed, she inflicted self-mutilation, she didn’t want to speak with me, or, if she did, it was very aggressive. She also had ferocious jealousy against her younger sister and there was always screaming in the house. You advised me to stage the death of my younger daughter. I lay her down in the middle of the room, dressed in white with a white sheet, surrounded by white candles and flowers. I dressed in black and called my older daughter (who was made aware that we were going to make an act but without knowing the details). Seeing the scene, she was enraged. As you told me to do, I said, “Your sister is dead. Is this how you want to see her?” She angrily responded, “Of course not! What do you take me for?” Next, I had to say, “So then revive her.” Crying, she got close to her sister and said, “I want you to live!” Then, taking her hand, she continued repeating, “Live, please!” Her sister woke up and they hugged, crying. You told me that if she accepted to revive her sister, I should invite them both to dinner at a restaurant. This is what we did. We got ready and the three of us went out. Interestingly, the server who waited on us gave my eldest daughter a rose and said he thought she was very beautiful. When we finished eating, I suggested we go back to the house. To my surprise, my eldest daughter invited the younger one to continue the party, and they went out for the first time together and stayed out until dawn.

The following day, we went to bury the candles and to plant a plant above them. Several days have passed and I see my daughter smiling and animated; the relationship with me got radically better.

104. I received this card from Bilbao, Spain:

I am a twenty-three-year old man who asked for a psychomagic act during Christmas, 2005. The petition was to free me from a continuous and painful knot in my throat. When I presented the problem, you asked me, “Do you have sisters?” I said, “Three, older.” You intuited that they could have raised me with the idea that boys don’t cry. You advised me to dress as a woman with my sisters’ clothes that best fit me and, dressed like that, stand in front of my father and cry. . . . My mother has always criticized men who dress as women, and me, perfectly programmed, I never put on a woman’s dress unless I was drunk or to flirt with a girl. . . . Then I found another fear: Am I gay? Will doing this make me realize I like men?

The third day of March of 2006, I put on my sister’s clothes before dinner. Dressed in a skirt, I went to the dining room. When they saw me they were surprised and laughed. The first comment was, “How pretty you are!” I didn’t feel like crying but rather an absolute transparency before my parents. I told them, “This is a psychomagic act (they had already heard of you) and now I must cry but I don’t feel like it.” What I did was talk; I told them that I have felt very alone since I was a child, that I didn’t hold any grudge, and I told them I love them . . . a magical, freeing moment. The days that followed, I doubted everything. I thought because I didn’t cry it had not worked. I even felt the pain in my throat had increased. I also intuited that this showed me somehow that if I didn’t cry it was because I didn’t want to cry. Perhaps my tears were not sadness but rage. To my amazement, everything matured within me. Today, I cry. Not every day like a Magdelena. . . . But if there is a moment in which I need to cry, I can. Initially, just a little, but more easily each time. The painful knot in the throat has disappeared.

105. I received this card from Paris, France:

I went to see you in February 2007 because of a professional problem. Being one of the best students in my theater school, I was surprised to fail in all of my auditions. Why couldn’t I have success in order to launch my career? You, after reading my Tarot, immediately asked me questions about my father. I told you that he, now dead, had been a mediocre actor who made a living with small roles for a television series. Bitter, he hated the world. His golden dream was to play the role of the protagonist in Le Misanthrope by Molière, which (in my school) I played many times.

You suggested I go my father’s grave and leave a bouquet of flowers and a copy of Molière on his tombstone. Afterward, on the way back, I put on a long, blonde wig and a crown of thorns and blessed everyone I met along my route. I needed two months to gather the courage to do this. The long wig was easy to find, but to get the crown of thorns I had to hire a specialized florist to make it. When I had it in my hands, I quit making up excuses to delay the moment. At nine in the morning, I took the metro to the cemetery where I had not been in six years, since my grandfather’s burial. I had not gone to my father’s funeral. The trip took an hour. After much searching, I finally found the grave site. As agreed, I left the bouquet of flowers and the book, and I said, “The Misanthrope is your dream, not mine. I am giving it back. I will always love you, but I am not you. I will stop hating the world. I will allow myself to succeed where you failed.” I put the wig on, the crown of thorns, and I took leave. My heart started beating rapidly. The hardest part had begun. I would need, at least, fifteen minutes to get to the metro.

As you asked, I began to bless the people in the street. “Bless you, Madame,” “Bless you, Sir.” Contrary to what I imagined, the people did not react with aggression. Some seemed astonished, but many thanked me without making fun of me. A woman asked me who I was, and I told her I was the Savior and I laughed. Jubilation was mixed with the fear and excitation. Another woman, after I blessed her, whispered, “May the peace of the Father be with you.” I must have blessed forty people. Upon entering the metro car, I repeated three times loudly, “I bless you all.” I sat peacefully, sure of myself. No one bothered me. A beggar got up and promised me, “God will give me back one hundred times the money I will give you.” He gave me all the money he carried in his pocket. When I came up out of the metro, taking off the disguise, my eyes were full of tears. Following your advice, I kept the crown and the wig in a package under my bed for a week, then I buried them and planted a laurel tree.

For the fifteen following days, I felt abnormally tired. A month later I got my first big television role. I am going to play François Mitterrand in his youth. I am excited and anxious, but happy!

106. I received this card from Buenos Aires, Argentina:

During my travels to France, I asked for a psychomagic act because I have vitiligo, a skin pigment illness (the same disease Michael Jackson had), which is cured with medication sold in Cuba. Even though I have already been twice to La Habana for treatment, it always happens that another spot appears, which worried me a lot. You asked me what was the problem with the illness. I answered that the spots can grow little by little, and new ones can appear. You asked, what was wrong with that? I said that if the illness succeeds, it could make me completely albino. You asked me what was wrong with that. I didn’t know what to say.

The act you recommended consisted of going out onto the street dressed only in shorts and with my whole body painted white. I should walk around a long time and have a white chocolate ice-cream cone. And, at the end of my walk, I should take a photograph of myself nude and then hang it in the living room of my home. This should be done with a lover accompanying me. This was the real problem.

When you prescribed the act, I was passing through a dreadful drought in the love sphere. The following week, just back to Buenos Aires, where the warm climate made the act easier to achieve, I found myself with a telephone call from my impossible love: a girl whom I adored and to whom I had given my number many months before.

I bought the makeup and prepared to cover my whole body. I began with the penis, which has a white spot on it. I imagined, as I painted myself, that the spot would grow larger, and I would be totally invaded. The thing didn’t seem strange to me. I am a cartoonist, and I spend all day coloring. I put my shorts on and went out with my friend. I did well pretending to be relaxed. I wanted to walk as rapidly as possible like when someone travels down a road and passes a garbage dump and so holds his or her breath until the bad odor passes. I wanted to avoid relating to the girl in order not to embarrass her, but she took my hand. I realized that she accepted me, and that it wasn’t a problem for her if I looked like this. There things started to change. Not only did I relax, I understood the importance of having made the act together with her.

A drunk yelled a greeting to me, and I responded the same; some workers having lunch on the street celebrated my passing, and I celebrated their lunching. Then, for the climax, I went into the main pedestrian street in the middle of the city where cloaked in tourists who come and go making purchases, I walked on the side where a Norteño music band was playing. The guitarist yelled, “I, too, want to be white!” A curious man asked me if I was saying good-bye to being single. Many people pretended to be disinterested. Upon arriving at my home, my friend took the photo of me completely naked, which I had framed and hung in my living room. Then I took a bath to remove the makeup, and my friend assisted me. I watched as the paint vanished and my color returned. Now the spots don’t look like albino tumors expanding but like little white islands dominated by a large mass of skin color that keep the spots corralled. The act was good for me. My friend and I established a relationship of deep romance, and I no longer fear the vitiligo.

107. I received a testimony signed by the well-known French singer and composer, Arthur H (born 1966), the son of another well-known singer and composer, Jacques Higelin (born 1940):

My father was an artist full of fantasy, history, songs, well connected with the imaginary world of a child. However, tormented by the murky past, he felt incapable of assuming a relatively balanced family life. The centrifugal force of the violence coming from his depths increasingly pushed him toward the incessant encounters: a constant drain that might give him a sense of confinement. The deep love that united my parents made it so that the separation was long and painful. My mother had to progressively detach, tired of the excess of absence and return and the infinitely unfulfilled promises.

It was in this era that I began to expect it, completely impregnated (to the extent of making these things my own) with my mother’s anxiety. Sometimes, my father would arrive unexpected from a tour, which was a beautiful gift. Other times, he announced his appearance—giving a precise date and time—but he wouldn’t show; or he came finally after excruciating delay. I went from excitement, pride, and worry, to resignation, then deception, and finally indifference, mixed with a deep anxiety, and I thought, “Maybe he is dead and no one knows.” When he finally arrived, I was already deep in depression, was not capable of supporting the energy of my father, and although I was happy to see him, I felt empty, impotent to expressing my feelings. As an adult, this sadness, although it had fulfilled me artistically, did not stop invading me. I lived in a state of constant delay, wishing to exist before his eyes in order to truly exist. The was no difference between these feelings and those of my mother, always worried and disillusioned waiting for the appearance of her lunatic and indifferent lover, preparing herself unconsciously for a future abandonment.

Alejandro recommended a psychomagic act: Freud was wrong. It is not necessary to kill the father (what would a dead father serve?) but to absorb him, make him live within. Symbolically, only once, transform yourself into your father, and now that you are a musician, a man of the public, turn yourself into your father in front of your audience, in a performance. Having captivated the audience let it be overwhelmed by the delay; you will not again be a child suffering before an unattainable, insurmountable father. You dress up as your father, and singing some songs, tell your public, “I am Jacques Higelin!”

My first reaction was rejection as if I had no right to play with something sacred. But, little by little, this act appeared to liberate me. When the chosen day arrived, I followed Alejandro’s instructions to a tee. Before the end of my concert, I asked my musicians to leave me alone on the stage. I took out a suitcase that had been hidden behind an amplifier, and I threw it over a piano. It made a really loud noise. Then, in the middle of a deep silence, I asked the public, “Is there someone hidden in this suitcase?” Then, with total sincerity, I told them about my relationship with my father, his absence, the waiting, and also the love. While I spoke, I undressed until I was nude before the gaze of a shocked audience. “Here I am nude before you all, just like the day I was born.” Then I opened the suitcase and began to take out my father’s clothes, which had been taken from his home. “This is my father’s familiar clothing that my father used on stage: a worker’s jumpsuit, a belt of nails, an embroidered velvet jacket, and old sandals.” It was a very intimate portrait; everyone laughed, so did I. “Now for an act of psychomagic, I will turn myself into my father.” I got dressed in the clothes, and I began to sing one of his most well-known songs. As to the reaction to such a strange situation, the audience was silently respectful. I was very consumed by the feeling that I had surpassed something that was prohibited. When I finished the song, I undressed and thanked my audience for having participated in my dream. I threw my father’s suit and then my own show clothes to the audience, making them participants in the healing. Again nude, I called my musicians to play our final number. This time I was completely myself, feeling a deep inner happiness. My collaborators were also happy, feeling the energy of freedom that was all around us.

Today I don’t expect anything from my father. I don’t have the need to exist in his eyes in order to truly exist. I don’t have the need for him to listen to me in order to be able to express myself. I feel like there is still in my gut some rage, but instead of repressing it and turning it on myself, I can let it flow, express it, and transform it to make it fertile and creative, bestowing a vital energy on me and impelling me toward the world and toward others. I have decided to forgive my parents, free myself, and free them from the negative charge of the past, choosing to not see in them more than what life gives and all of the love that can be transmitted to me.