Poetry by Charlie Brice

           Tom Bennett CC



The Realism of Magic

Years ago, when I was one of Freud’s finest, 
my friend Stan, a psychiatrist, asked what I 
wanted to accomplish with my patients.
I thought of D. W. Winnicott’s answer: 
the goal, he said, was for the analyst to survive 

and get paid, which outraged my theory-
challenged psychoanalytic colleagues who
couldn’t grasp that an analyst surviving
the patient’s unconscious hatred permitted
them to experience the messy multiplex

of all their feelings, while paying the analyst
established the analyst as an Other with whom 
the patient had to deal regardless of his or her 
desires or fantasies. Think of that! Patients could 
hate without destroying love and cross

the desolate desert of narcissism to discover
that other people are separate with their own 
desires and destinies. But what about my answer 
to Stan’s question? I said I wanted patients to 
confront who and what they are and see that 

there is no magic in the world. Stan was appalled: 
magic, he said, makes living in the world worth it. 
I pushed back: once patients recognize who and what 
they are, belief in magic enables them to never alter 
anything but insist that mere understanding will

make their failing marriages succeed, or take off
the pounds, or get them that promotion without 
ever having to work harder. I knew analysts 
who kept patients in analysis for years, never urged 
them to actually do something to change themselves.
 
Stan was unconvinced: he wanted magic in his life
and the lives of his patients. If you’re a good person,
somehow life works out. If your love is pure, your
love life will be fine. Sit back, let life take you where 
it will. Years later Stan suffered a massive heart attack. 

It came out that he had no savings, no retirement plan. 
He survived, but had to immediately return to his practice 
in order to pay the mortgage, grocery bills, car payments. 
That’s where he is today: working a forty to sixty-hour week, 
riding the comet-tail of magic into his eightieth year.
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Charlie Brice is the winner of the 2020 Field Guide Magazine Poetry Contest and is the author of Flashcuts Out of Chaos (2016), Mnemosyne’s Hand (2018), An Accident of Blood (2019), and The Broad Grin of Eternity (forthcoming), all from WordTech Editions. His poetry has been nominated for the Best of Net anthology and twice for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in The Atlanta Review, Chiron Review, Plainsongs, I-70 Review, The Sunlight Press, Anti-Heroin Chic, and elsewhere.