Sympathetic Magic
After 400 years of modern thinking superstition has been thoroughly discredited as the vestigial remnant of a backwards age—the so-called age of magic. But make no mistake, the absolute dismissal of superstition is in itself the result of a two-bit chauvinist psychology. The haughty disdain with which magical thinking is met with in our modern society is a sign inverse to the degree of its repression; or violent and murderous suppression if the witch hunts are any indication. Science and religion would banish all superstition but in the last instance it cannot—it would be like trying to banish bacteria, or your own wicked thoughts. Instead, science has learned to repackage this superstitious stuff and now calls it the placebo effect.
Placebo as a name is peculiar in its own right for it means at once empty and magical; in this regard the christian ritual of the eucharist finds an exact equivalence. Nevertheless, and to the scientist’s dismay, placebo effect happens all the time. For the placebo/eucharist is never empty, but can be just absolutely crammed with all the magnetic elements of sympathetic magic: projection, identification, fear, desire, belief; it is the zero-symbol par excellence and attracts all manner of fantasy material. What activates the placebo is not just a remnant of the priest or witch-doctor’s method, but is rather the very medium by which their magic travels. While most everyone admits to the existence of projections, very few would dare to know just how much projection we live inside of. Things are obscured by the ideas of things. It is precisely here, in this projected realm of spirits and mutagenic forms (that some people call the world), that placebo functions. In this realm of shades, the omnipotent medical doctor (or priest/shaman), as the person-who-is-presumed-to-know, takes on a fantasmatic power that, through the medium of trance, can, somehow, effect real change in the psyche-soma—It is important to note that it is a change that the patient is allowing to happen, according to their own wish.
Once upon a time the whole world operated along these intrapsychic lines of sympathetic magic—by the powers of trance. The age of religion put a monopoly on trance and policed it by violence. Now we want to deny that any such trance exists at all. But one might only talk long enough to any Christian nationalist to witness nearly all of its more deluded effects.
The psychoanalyst refers to the trance phenomena, when it appears isolated in the treatment, as transference. This brings us to what may be a principle therapeutic axiom: it is better (probably) to recognize your reality as being a kind of trance, than to assume your trance is reality.
Sleeping Beauty, 1959, photograph by author
