I have been rereading some of the fantasy books from my adolescence, like Michael Moorcock’s Stormbringer and, most recently, the Earthsea books of Ursula K. Le Guin. They are balms for me, worlds living within others’ minds, Tolkien’s heirs and aspirants who explore the problems of our own world through characters removed enough from ourselves to allow us to tolerate the author holding a light to our own foibles and paucities. Spending my days in a similar exercise with tangibly real people in their inescapably real lives, it perhaps seems ironic that this should be a relief and oasis to me, but it is.
These books have me thinking about how I have always loved the idea of wizards and their kind, people who can use words to change the world directly. From my childhood, I was convinced that there were mysterious forces at work in the universe that could be called forth and made use of, if one knew the right words and could generate the right intention. When I was introduced to Dungeons & Dragons – way back in 1976, as a freshman in high school – my first character could only ever have been a wizard, or magic-user, as they were called in the game at the time.
Obviously, I’m not the only one with this fascination. I’m no anthropologist, but my experience of other cultures suggests that this belief – that special words can change the world in a direct way – is universal. East and West, technological and hunter-gatherer, Northern or Southern hemispheres, every people I’ve been exposed to has stories about persons who can use language to manipulate their environments. In some places, these persons and their powers are taken as facts, while in others they might be merely entertaining tales, but this idea, that the world is affected by, even made of, words appears everywhere.
I think this is not an accident. We grant language tremendous power. How many times have you heard someone say – or said yourself – “he made me do that,” meaning that he said something to you that you believed forced you to a given action. A child comes crying to a caregiver because another child called them a name, or you feel your heart bloom when someone you care for says they love you. With all the power we give to and rely upon from language, it’s not a stretch to imagine conjuring something corporeal just by speaking, nor to be fascinated by the prospect. But we know that this is not really a thing; there is no “abracadabra” that actually manifests a rabbit nor curse that precipitates death.
And yet, trained scientist and confirmed atheist that I am, I have come to believe in a certain kind of word-magic: because of the power we give to language, we can change our lives through words. Indeed, that is how I understand Freud’s great contribution, that talking can literally heal. It’s not saying “abracadabra” and a rabbit jumps out of someone’s top hat; it’s more like saying, “how might you think about this thing differently” and the person you’re speaking with suddenly feels free of decades of burden. This is the deep joy of psychotherapy: witnessing someone’s world change because they have discovered language that seemed hidden to them. We can tell a person “secret” stories – stories that aren’t actually secrets at all, just never told to them – and watching how, from those stories, new universes unfold before and within them.
In the real world, it’s rare that such moments actually occur suddenly; abrupt enlightenment occurs only after long preparation, like the near-instantaneous emulsification of mayonnaise coming only after slowly and patiently dribbling oil into whipping egg, or finally topping a wall after long days of hauling stone to build a staircase up it. But that front-loaded psychotherapeutic work itself occurs in language: building trust, sharing vocabulary, distinguishing old ideas and introducing and refining new ones. Yes, language does change worlds – individuals’ worlds – and the way it does so feels magical to me.
It seems almost inevitable that I became a psychologist, and a psychotherapist in particular, because words have always felt magical to me. When I was young, I struggled to make them work for me as easily as they appeared to work for others and it seemed like there was a secret that others, initiates, withheld from me, uninitiated. Paradoxically, this led me to invest long and deeply in words, understanding them, learning how better to use them to connect with others. Today, as I approach the commencement of my 65th year, I feel that I have some understanding and appreciation of the power of language and it is my joy to share that magic with others.