The Symbolic Task and The White-Haired Man
The Holy Mountain, Alejandro Jodorowsky. 1973.
Derek Simpson February 24, 2026
“I’m going to give you an act of psychomagic. It won’t address your consciousness but your unconscious.”
A white-haired man offers this gentle proposal to a white-haired woman seeking remedy for her depression. He instructs her to fill a bottle with tap water. “In order to get out of the condition you’re in, and in order to be the master you are because that’s what you are, you’re going to have to start giving…”
They take a one-block-walk to the Jardin des Plantes, he matches her reluctant pace. In due time, the man pauses their stride, planting his feet along the side of the cement walkway. “Look at this.” He points up at an ancient, wondrous tree poised from within the Earth, frozen in a timeless stretch. “It’s at least 300 years old.” The woman approaches this perfect giant to address it directly. “At first I’m afraid with your big roots, I’m afraid that you… that you…” her arms writhe over an invisible body, miming the hold that the unknown has on her “that you hold me too tightly. I’m afraid. But when I look up it’s fine. I see how beautiful you are.”
The man hands her the bottle, encouraging her to feed her new ally some water and to look up while she does. Sunlight pushes through these woven branches to reach her as the connectedness she previously could not feel is once again present and intuitively understood —she’s been reminded. This man, now beaming, urges her to repeat this ritual with her majestic new friend for the next 20 days explaining that the tree and her are now one, that they share a life.
Our white-haired man is Alejandro Jodorowsky, the creator of psychomagic: a technique for therapy that filters select practices of folk healing through Freud’s theories of the unconscious mind. Put simply, a psychomagic act is a symbolic task to be performed faithfully; your own personal shamanic assignment.
The one sacred rule for a psychomagic act is as follows: if it is prescribed it must be completed. You can, of course, give it a healthy dose of contemplative time before taking action —some clients have even waited years to perform their act. Considering the uncomfortable nature of some of these prescriptions, which regularly include instructions like “act out your own birth with a maternal and paternal participant” or “paint a self portrait with your own blood”, it’s understandable that a client might exhaust any and all other options first. But inevitably we find that in order to heal ourselves, in Jodorowsky’s own words, “we have to do something we’ve never done before - and the harder the better.”
“Jodorowsky respects the intellect but he also understands that in our attempts to heal ourselves, our intellect may only bring us so far.”
Jodorowsky is a noted disruptor, and commonly referenced among lovers of the counter-culture for his groundbreaking contributions to the world of film.. He has long been testing common assumptions on what heights we can and should aspire to in our art-making. Where David Lynch famously traded his paintbrush for a camera and saw clear potential for the motion picture to become the moving painting, Jodorowsky saw an even greater potential for the medium: to heal the ancestral wounds of humanity. It’s clear, in retrospect, that his earliest works for the screen, Fando Y Lis, El Topo, and The Holy Mountain, all hold the seeds of psychomagic. Each of these films attempts to aggravate the viewer’s unconscious mind. He hopes to inspire permanent release from mass mental imprisonment. With his more recent autobiographical pictures, The Dance of Reality and Endless Poetry, the intention is streamlined. These two films are Jodorowsky’s attempts to heal his own ancestral wounds; they are two distinct acts of psychomagic, self-prescribed.
One moment from 2013’s The Dance of Reality shows Jodorowsky as a boy. He stands atop a cliff ready to jump. The young protagonist is suffering constant abuse by the hands of his own father and is regularly ostracized by those his own age. In the moment he begins to lean forward, our white-haired man emerges from behind to pull him back onto the cliff. In this scene, our director plays his own intuition. He realigns his young self by speaking a series of soft truths, ending in a whisper—“Something is dreaming us. Embrace the Illusion. Live.”
In order to fully embrace the illusion, we must surrender all intellectual reasoning: this is the central tenet of psychomagic. Jodorowsky respects the intellect but he also understands that in our attempts to heal ourselves, our intellect may only bring us so far. Our baggage will become alchemized instead through poetic action. Is that not, after all, what we are all looking for?
If we truly want to heal ourselves, then why is this powerful idea yet to be widely acknowledged? We could cast psychomagic aside out of discomfort or we could say that its wide-eyed discoverer is ahead of his time, but maybe there’s a middle way, a more empowering option. We could instead make ourselves vulnerable, admitting that we don’t actually know what we need in order to heal our deepest pains. Once we’ve come to accept that, we could maybe even muster the courage to open ourselves up to something new, to do something we’ve never done before.
When the white-haired woman was first explaining her depressive predicament to Jodorowsky, she also expressed her doubts. At one point she boils it down to a simple restraint “I don’t understand.” Jodorowsky responds with grace “So let your unconscious understand. I’m not holding a philosophical speech, I’m to perform an act of psychomagic to speak to the unconscious. Psychoanalysis uses words. Psychomagic uses acts. We’re going to perform a psychomagic act.”
Psychomagic: A Healing Art. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Satori Films, 2019.
Jodorowsky, Alejandro. Psychomagic: The Transformative Power of Shamanic Psychotherapy. Inner Traditions, 2010.
Dragó, Fernando Sánchez. “Alejandro Jodorowsky: Psychomagic (English subtitles) (Full Interview)” Youtube, Uploaded by Maganopigadus, 27 Jul. 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_mTFg7u6VA.
The Dance of Reality. Directed by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Le Soleil Films, Caméra One, 2013.
