Magicians, Tricksters, and the First Good Man

A love letter to therapy and healing the father wound through dreams, transference, and sitting in the fire of transformation.

Let’s begin with a dream:

I’m at a Derren Brown show. He invites me on stage to hypnotise me. I am calm and curious. He is tallish and bald and slim. First, he tells me I’m here because I’m looking for a father figure (in him). I am unimpressed and tell him I’ve been working on this in therapy for the last two years. Then he says something about my addiction to Coca-Cola, which also didn’t impress me as I’m fully aware of it. He finally asks me to think about a swimsuit and goes backstage. I imagine a white bikini with red stripes in crumpled fabric, but he comes back wearing a satin black and white one–the pattern is right but the colours and material are off. He then hypnotises me to say a fruit but I say a vegetable on purpose, to prove that he doesn’t have power over me. I feel disappointed but also impressed that he can’t control me. I want to talk to him about how he does it.

I have known a few magicians in my lifetime. Not the Darren Brown kind (I have actually never watched his shows or seen him speak), but the more insidious, who presents as a well-meaning, charming person you might find sitting across from you on a date or even in your childhood home.

The magicians in my life were true masters of disguise–subtle shapeshifters. They put on a delightful show either through their appearance, how they worked a room, or through their well-articulated ideas. They would draw you in with their charm and fantastic stories. Sometimes they would have real, remarkable talents they never fully actualised–an endearing trait that made you root for their act.

In time, however, they would get sloppy. Their performance would lose some of the spark, just like in the dream. What initially felt like magic would prove to be nothing more than a lifeless, well-rehearsed trick. Their fantastic stories would reveal to be wildly exaggerated or magically twisted by selectively leaving out important information. And their magnificent ideas–lifeless incantations obsessively repeated to anyone who would listen, like like a buffoon juggling the same four balls over and over.

Little did I know that this dream, which happened at the beginning of the year, would herald a powerful transformation in my psyche.

In the essay below, I discuss the dark aspects of the magician archetype through a psychological and alchemical lens that reveals patterns encountered in narcissism and narcissistic relationships. I’ll be using dreams and the transference encountered in my personal therapy to amplify these themes and give you a practical understanding of this important topic. You might also enjoy my essay on evil and the more recent writing on scapegoating as part of the same theme.