August 2018
I had a friend, Tom,
who I met at university when both of us were doing our PhD. He being far more organized
than I. finished writing his thesis a couple of years before me. The locus of
his work was on the magic realism in the early writings of Jorge Luis Borges
(1899-1986), the Argentinian author.
Tom’s PhD thesis was
examined and passed with flying colours. We spoke once, at the completion of
it, and then he disappeared, literally. I couldn’t find any information about
where he went; even his parents
and brother had no clue. No death notices, no life notices, nothing.
In a fantastical
effort to discern where he went, I scattered, upside down, a set of animal
druid cards. In that set are two blank cards, there to encourage its users to
create a couple of animal narratives of their own. The two blank cards came up.
I picked up a third, and it was “the fox”. The fox is an elusive being, known
for hiding among grasses, and disappearing when he wants. I felt then that Tom
just didn’t want to be found, and no online searches could unearth anything.
There are, it seems, three men with the same name, but none of them living in
our time frame.
How extraordinary,
really, that his fox-like disappearance fits so well with the nature of his
academic work! He, or rather I,
made a myth from him simply being/not being there.
Magic realism is a
genre of literary fiction characterized by the matter-of-fact inclusion of the
richness of a psychological
imaginary into an otherwise realistic and ordinary framework. Tom’s life had
that quality: he showed me how to use
a computer by playing with it, we ate meals together, we walked the campus
together, and he tripped while walking downhill, somersaulted mid-air, and
landed on his feet like a finely tuned cat, while I, on a different evening
fell and broke both hands. We got on well and once he celebrated passing his
PhD, he disappeared.
Magic realism situates
itself neatly in the discourse of psychotherapy. I note here that I am not
talking of magical thinking. Magical thinking is
defined as believing that one event happens as a result of another without a
plausible link of causation. This is unconscious thinking. Magic realism, on the contrary, is an
actual and conscious tool in
literature and, I suggest, in psychotherapy in order to engage a person more
richly in a life not fully lived.
Active imagination, as practiced by
Jungians and others, including me, could be said to be a magic realism tool, and is used as a bridge between the
conscious and unconscious mind. It is a method for visualizing and fleshing out unconscious
issues by drawing upon the
imagination. This is a very useful tool and has the capacity to build meaning,
new memories and connection in the field in which the client lives.
Much of what we do, as
psychotherapists, is pragmatic and here and now, and yet it merges the ordinary
subtly into landscapes of the imagination and dreams, for a purpose. The mind,
decorated with elaborations of enriched memory, becomes a luminous space of
possibilities and our exploration of these, transforms ordinary reality. This is why I ask my clients what they
love to do, and whether they paint, play music, write, dance. I want to know
what magic they engage in and how can we use that for their healing.
There can be a danger
in the making myth of life events, but properly and ethically handled, it is a
very powerful tool. I think once
more of Borges’ writing and his emphasis on containment and playful control of
words and sentences. Nothing is wasted and nothing slops over into a messy
unconsciousness, and yet …
And so, with Borges I say, “I know what the Greeks do not know, incertitude” for the bridge between this world and
the world of the imagination is always open and what is learned in this
here-and-now world and the imaginary is always magical and very real.
