You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
This essay will attempt to abstract from the documented experiences of Carlos Castaneda* certain implications for the practice of psychoanalytic psychotherapy. As a graduate student of anthropology, Castaneda's field study of medicinal herbs and psychotropic plants led him into a ten-year apprenticeship with an aging Mexican Yaqui Indian, don Juan Mateus, self-styled sorcerer and “man of knowledge.” In four volumes based on extensive field notes Castaneda describes an extraordinary tutelage which ultimately enabled the author to immerse himself at will in a “separate reality” unbound by the limits of space, time, and motion as we know them.
In undertaking this task I urge the reader who doubts the legitimacy of Castaneda's account to grant these pages the same degree of evenly hovering attention that clinicians ideally adopt in their consulting rooms. For my part, I write as one persuaded of the authenticity of his experiences.
During his early meetings with the sorcerer, in which Castaneda pressed don Juan to act as a paid informant on “power plants,” the old Indian refused money and mocked the student's prepared genealogical questionnaire, dismissing it as “crap” and adding, indifferently, that he had dropped his personal history. Mystified and frustrated, Castaneda reports that he nevertheless felt there to be “a silent consistency” about don Juan's acts, “a consistency which was thoroughly baffling to me…. His mere company forced me to