#14 How to do magic.

To cast spells you need to exist first // Winnicott’s Real Self

The Magic Circle - John William Waterhouse (via the Tate Modern)

Hi friends,

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Anyway, I’ve been thinking much more lately about magic. Having trained within a psychotherapeutic model (clinical psychology) that leans heavily on scientism (essentially, the belief that science is the only way to determine what is true), claiming the language of magic to make sense of both my everyday life and many aspects of my work has felt like a creative, liberating act. CBT therapists actually refer to “magical thinking” as a cognitive distortion! I, on the other hand, really can’t speak of it highly enough.

What is magic?

The idea of doing magic might conjure images of wand waving, cauldrons, levitating, and other things that seem bizarre or out of reach. But magic is not (only) these things. In fact, I’m pleased to inform you that I’m certain you’re already doing magic. You do magic in anything you focus your attention on. There is magic in deep listening, in cleaning your apartment, in the food you make for yourself or your lover, in taking time to mend something that is broken. There is magic in choosing your clothes and jewellery, in the songs you sing over and over again, in what you invest your money in, and especially in your unwillingness to give up your greatest longings in spite of logical evidence of their unfeasibility.

How to do magic

The magic I have done most successfully has involved:

• Prolonged attention. Magic makers do well to count their time in years, not days.

• Receptivity. Rather than seeking out a recipe for a magic spell in a book, I decide what I want to make happen and then listen out for life to let me know how to do it. (Although, life might in fact invite one to consult a spell book, which is also extremely fun.)

• Self responsibility. I must be in charge of the magic, not whining to the “universe” like a teenager asking a parent for pocket money. I have to own my powers and gifts, my limitations and my desires.

• Love. My power expands in equal measure with the love I feel for what I am seeking or its beneficiary (even if the beneficiary is myself).

• Ritual. Like writers and creative people who talk of keeping a regular appointment with the Muse (Steven Pressfield and Julia Cameron write beautifully about this), magic, luck, synchronicity and chance seem most magnetised to standing appointments and rituals. It works when I show up with reverence over and over again.

• Honesty. I must be honest about who I really am, what I am really ready for and what I really want. I can only be successful in conjuring up things I truly want, so I must know what they are.

• A really, really clean house. Seriously.

In my experience, magic cannot change the true Will of another person, or change what is fundamentally true. But it can create things that seem so far-fetched as to appear impossible. Our vision is so extraordinarily narrow, and we are so bound by particular theories that we struggle to think beyond them. As a result, it becomes easy to conclude what is or isn’t possible based on ideas of rationality that bear little resemblance to reality. It’s especially powerful to feel into the distinction between what the alchemists refer to as imaginario (a practical, realistic imagery of something) versus fantasia (a fantastical, impossible seeming version). We must bring our seemingly fanciful visions down to Earth and weave a compelling story of them that makes them seem real and ordinary, so that they might become so. Imagining the impossible realised, over and over again in the most intricate detail is a powerful enchantment.

Therapy as spell casting

Good therapy is a form of spell casting in that it helps the patient create more real, believable stories for themselves about broader possibilities of life - healthier, more loving relationships, more fulfilling work, a greater sense of safety, better sex, freedom from anxiety. A good therapy is also one that contains everything on the list above (except a clean house - you’re on your own there 😁). It occurs over time, in a ritualised time and place. The therapist offers a loving, devoted, prolonged attention to the patient, who is also invited to pay deep attention to themselves. Both parties are responsible for themselves and their part, and careful attention is paid in noticing every area where the patient does not feel themselves to be a true agent of change in their lives.

Magic and the real self

I want to say more about honesty, that is, being real. Often this is the most difficult part of doing magic, and therapy. If there is one thing I have learned in my work, it’s that many, many people really do not know what they want. They are unable to be powerful, because they are unable to be honest about their desires, because they have absolutely no idea what their desires actually are. Whole therapies can be conducted, and in fact, tragically, whole lives lived with great fluster and fuss and busyness and striving and clever things said and mountains climbed, but absolutely no attention paid to whether any of it has anything to do with what the person actually wanted; with no connection to anything resembling a real self.

My recent psychoanalytic study has been in the area of modern psychoanalysis, a school founded by Hymen Spotnitz, who, like many of the sons and daughters of Freud, pursued the question of whether psychoanalysis could evolve to be more suitable a treatment for more unwell or psychotic patients, and those who were previously deemed “unanalysable”. What always strikes me when I read his work, and the work of other analysts with a similar cause, is how much their descriptions of these seemingly especially mad patients remind me of aspects either of my (visibly high-functioning) patients or my own self. The “analysable”, neurotic patient, though framed as the average person walking through the analyst’s door, seems like a rare and increasingly irrelevant creature.

D.W. Winnicott (via The School of Life)

Those who we have cynically come to call the “worried well” are in fact so often presenting a carefully curated false self, deeply disconnected from the real person and their real desires, while masking a complex, dark carnage underneath. A much beloved analyst and theorist, D.W. Winnicott wrote much about the concept of the real and false self in therapy. In a beautiful study of his clinical work, James William Anderson (2014) interviewed a number of Winnicott’s former patients, many of whom were analysts themselves. Several of these patients gave accounts of long therapies completed before their treatments with Winnicott. They reflected on these first analyses as having been conducted above and without real acknowledgement of the depth of their underlying illness. Several reported a profound sense of darkness and non-existence that, in years of treatment, was never acknowledged. What they found in their work with Winnicott, by contrast, was a therapist who could journey with them through great dependence, deeply regressed states, resurgent pain and suffering, and true emotional risk, to help them feel real for the first time. Winnicott (1960) himself wrote:

”In one case, a man patient who had had a considerable amount of analysis before coming to me, my work really started with him when I made it clear to him that I recognized his nonexistence. He made the remark that over the years all the good work done with him had been futile because it had been done on the basis that he existed, whereas he had only existed falsely. When I had said that I recognized his nonexistence he felt that he had been communicated with for the first time. What he meant was that his True Self that had been hidden away from infancy had now been in communication with his analyst in the only way which was not dangerous.” (p. 151).

We cannot do magic unless we feel real, and more of us hold a deep feeling of unreality than I think is ever really acknowledged. In the words of M. Masud Khan, another former patient and long time collaborator of Winnicott, “He gave me a feeling of being let into a new world. At the same time, he gave me a feeling I had experienced it before.” Magic, like good therapy, works to create a different world, one that is new, but paradoxically familiar. And that world, the one that we recognise even when we have never been there, we recognise because it is our own. That world, the one to which we belong, only opens to our real selves.

In love, and the pursuit of a shared path to a greater truth,

Kate

Anderson, J. W. (2014). How D. W. Winnicott conducted psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic Psychology, 31(3), 375–395. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035374

Winnicott, D. W. (1960). Ego distortion in terms of true and false self. In D. W. Winnicott (Ed.), The maturational processes and the facilitating environment: Studies in the theory of emotional development (pp. 140–152). New York, NY: International Universities Press.