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Wayne Kigerl

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Hatching Charlie: A Psychotherapist's Tale

by Charles C. McCormack (Goodreads Author)

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read in December 2016

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Wayne Kigerl said: " Climb aboard Charlie’s magical couch—have a beer, probably Freudian Stout—and enjoy the psychoanalytical ride of your life. Lay back and get into his mind; meet his wives, lovers, friends, co-workers, demons, children, and peers; share his accomplish Climb aboard Charlie’s magical couch—have a beer, probably Freudian Stout—and enjoy the psychoanalytical ride of your life. Lay back and get into his mind; meet his wives, lovers, friends, co-workers, demons, children, and peers; share his accomplishments and failures; hopes and fears: a story of pain, joy, and self-discovery that unfolds with a clarity that few can match. Perhaps he should be committed.

No, that is the sort of joke only a friend can make. We were lifeguards together on a Maryland ocean beach, where he sort of saved me, once. I also worked in the mental health field at the Presidio, US Army—so I appreciate the challenges, accomplishments, and likely egg-tooth he was born with that enabled him to never quit, to emerge and finally take flight in that most personal of professions—psychotherapy.

To some, his journey may seem unconventional—a free-associative, flight-of-fancy, over the years, that necessitated the conquering of many hurdles, some of his own making, others the foible finger of fate—a military father failing to confront his own demons.

Nevertheless, with Charlie’s creative, inquisitive, expressive, and imaginative mind, I believe his writing will firmly garner him a place in medical history as the Oscar Wilde of Psychotherapy—his story unfolds like beautiful Salome’s (Wilde’s tragic play and more recent Tom Robbins’ novel) in which a dancer peels off each of her seven veils, until she is wearing little or nothing. As each veil drops, she comes to an epiphany about life.

In a way, Charlie’s story reads like a well-performed strip-tease—the sequined reflections of his fifty-year psychotherapeutic voyage take the reader through a kaleidoscopic journey into the sacred and profane, past many blessed and tortured realms, and eventual rapprochement with his “self”—family, wisdom, peace, transparency, and a final boat ride.

For anyone who wants to understand the challenges, rewards, and sometimes tragedies inherent in a mental health career, I cannot imagine a more revealing story.

Coming from a itinerate military family; shuffled in various schools, states, and countries; disciplined with a harsh military code of justice, overcoming a beginning as an 11-year old abandoned expatriate waif in a French boarding school; functioning as a barely focused Virginia college undergraduate, Charlie experiments, marries, mingles, travels, has children, finds his love of learning, gets a job as a social worker, endures the heart break of divorce, while fully invested in the fates of patients, some who fall by the wayside, victims of a system that sometimes acts—mechanically, bureaucratically, and corporately—bottom-line-dollar-broken and uncaring. Despite this, Charlie wades into the maelstrom, and somehow…and, I repeat…somehow…like a swimmer surfacing from crashing waves—never quits caring—and builds a successful career as a psychotherapist.

Rarely has the mental health realm been presented with such serious and yet irreverent, humane, and honest treatment. Through it all, Charlie perseveres, renews and rejoices; is true to himself, his patients and family.

Perhaps, regarding Charlie’s legacy, Oscar Wilde is again worthy of mention. His tomb, constructed in Père Lachaise Cemetery, Paris, France, is engraved with a verse from the Ballad of Reading Gaol by Wilde bequeathed to outcast men:

And alien tears will fill for him
Pity’s long-broken urn,
For his mourners will be outcast men,
And outcasts always mourn.

Unless, of course, they hop in the boat and head into the blue, their minds returning to the sea. ...more "

Jan 02, 2017 08:17PM · see review