Desire Machines. A Romanian Love Charms Database

Love charms are marginalized forms of psychological energizing and healing, which can still be encountered locally in rural Europe. To the postmodern Western intellectual, whose insight is not blurred by exclusive cultural taxonomies, they might appear to be the recessive counterpart of currently dominant psychotherapeutic practices. Like psychotherapy, love charming is performed in private sessions, by a legitimate specialist, on behalf of a suffering client, by means of general healing fiction (offered in response to specific complaints and meant to enhance the client’s sense of self-understanding, self-esteem, and power) and certain gestural scenarios, and in accordance with a given dogmatism (or theory).

However, in contradistinction to psychotherapy, the charm specialist is almost always a woman, the healing fiction is typically versified, and accompanied by ritualized gestures that act as metaphors of or models for the change aimed at in the charm, and there are no postural scenarios meant to stress the temporary domination of the “expert” over the client or any asymmetric relationship between them.

— Sanda Golopentia