Many years ago I was listening to a senior lecturer of Psychology in class. He was a wonderful and charming man and his subject was psychometric testing. Even back then I was pretty sensitive to the notion that a few questions and some tests could "nail" who you are or reveal some essential truth about your personality or intelligence - a priciple that is very common in the back pages of popular magazines. Anyway, psychometrics had me glazing over and listening to my lecturer's pleasing Italian accent as the content slipped lazily through my mind making no new neural links in my prefrontal lobe, when I heard him say... "You willa learna to be-a Psychomagician!"
"Yes!" cried out my vanity and hubris, "that's the job for me! A Psychomagician!" Of course, in his accented manner the lecturer was actually offering to teach us to be psycho-metric-ians, learning how to tease essential components from the human-as-machine-widget instead of white rabbits from the top hat of the psyche. I soon drifted off again.
Many years later, retraining in counselling and psychotherapy I found there were occasions with clients when white rabbits were pulled from hats... astonishing and surprising transformations. But no amount of pulling on my part made the difference. Instead, creating a space in which clients might just find their own resources and choices and ways of relating... and this, only if I could be real, honest and engaged rather than clever and masterful and technically adroit. More frequently people shifted quietly and gradually, moving closer to the weft of their own living by small degrees. Desiring to become a psychomagician was a tempting fantasy to escape or deny the ordinariness of humanity... but without it's mystique I sometimes get to see the extraordinariness of ordinary humanity... all lit up.
