Climb aboard Charlie’s magical couch 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, suffering, and self-discovery that illuminates the human condition and unfolds with a clarity few can match.
A memoir, Hatching Charlie follows an author born into an abusive military family who grows up as a nail-biting, head-banging insecure child in the 1950s, complete with experiences in the Jim Crow South, and then is exiled to a strict boarding school in France where he falls under the thumb of a sadistic priest. The turbulent 1960s follow, in which McCormack is expelled from college for drug use and later goes on a trip of personal discovery with his girlfriend across North America and Mexico in a VW Beetle. The couple has a frightening showdown with the Mexican police—followed by a fortuitous encounter when their car breaks down and they are rescued by a car mechanic who was once a Ph.D. psychologist.
Upon returning to the United States, McCormack studies to become a psychotherapist and thrives. However, there are dark moments along the way. Personal and professional successes and failures. He suffers from PTSD following the suicide of one patient, must physically throw himself at another to prevent her from slashing her wrists, and when his marriage ends in divorce, he also must confront the demons of his childhood which come forward with terrifying intensity.
McCormack—a well-reputed psychotherapist—must then face his own issues with love and loving, and his changing identity as he confronts the challenges of fatherhood and grandfatherhood, and then partial retirement. All along the way, McCormack offers valuable insights speaking with an authority that arises from years of personal self-reflection and self-accountability, along with the experience gained in over forty years as an individual and couples therapist. Unflinchingly, McCormack shares raw and personal examples of how we each can come to live self-limiting lives and become the principal barriers to our own happiness. Given McCormack’s creative, inquisitive, expressive, and imaginative mind, his story unfolds like a dancer peeling her seven veils, as each veil drops she comes to an epiphany about life, standing near naked at the end. Hatching Charlie takes the reader into the sacred and profane, past many blessed and tortured realms, into the challenges, rewards, and sometimes tragedies inherent in a mental health career and, truth be told, in life itself.
5.0 out of 5 starsWe can all relate... By PATRICIA L ALFIN, psychotherapist, retired. on January 4, 2017
Format: Kindle Edition
If you've ever wanted to read someone's diary, be a fly on the wall during a private exchange, or wondered what someone, possibly your therapist, really, really thinks then Hatching Charlie will roundly satisfy that curiosity. It's a fascinating read if you just leave it at that, but, in doing so you'd miss a rare invitation to be guided through elements of your own personal story on a parallel plane.
Charlie's story is Everyman's story, incorporated within his unique personal journey; a story written with courageous and generous transparency, serving to anchor and hold his emerging sense of self while facilitating the reader's understanding of our shared universal affliction.
Author McCormack's synthesis and summary of the psychoanalytic field's theories of human development and interpersonal dynamics is a gift in itself to lay readers and clinicians alike.
Written with humor, humility, clinical expertise and a loving respect for life and the human condition, Hatching Charlie heroically breaks new ground in the autobiography genre.
By Wayne Kigerl on December 26, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
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 itinerant 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.
By Wayne Kigerl on December 26, 2016
Format: Kindle Edition
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 itinerant 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.
Hatching Charlie my be read for free on kindle unlimited, for $3.99 on Kindle, and for $12.99 in paperback at amazon.com.
