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 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 the all the magnetic elements of sympathetic magic: projection, identification, fear, desire, belief. 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 (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 what may-as-well-be a kind 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. Now we want to deny that any such trance exists at all. But one might only talk long enough to any watcher of Fox News to witness nearly all of its more pathogenic effects. Psychoanalysis refers to the trance-phenomena, when it appears isolated in the treatment, as transference.
Sleeping Beauty, 1959, photograph by author
