A flyer looks at his map and sees a telephone pole and a silo.  He looks at the ground and sees a telephone pole and a silo.  He says: 'Now I know where we are,' but he is actually lost.  His friend says: 'Wait a minute.  On the ground are a telephone pole, a silo, and an oil derrick.  Find those on the map.'  'Well,' says the flyer, ' the pole and the silo are there, but the derrick isn't.  Maybe they left it out.'  So his friend says: 'Lend me the map.'  He looks over the whole map, including sections that the flyer ignored because he thought he knew where he was.  The friend finds, twenty miles off their charted course, a pole, a silo, and a derrick.  'We're not here,' he says, 'where you had your pencil mark, but away over there.'  'Oh, sorry,' says the pilot.  \r\n\r\nThe moral is, look at the ground first, and then at the map, and not vice versa. \r\n \r\nIn other words, the therapist listens to the patient and gets the plot of his script first, then he looks in Andrew Lang or Stith Thompson, and not vice versa.  In that way he will get a sound match, and not just a bright idea.  Then he can use the fairy tale to predict where the patient is headed, verifying from the patient (not from the book) all the way.

• procrustes
• therepy
• transactional analysis
• map
• awareness
• will
• thought
• other