Oriental Stories As Tools In Psychotherapy The Merchant And The Parrot With 100 Case Examples For Education And Self Help Springer Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 198

If you give someone a fish, you feed him only once. If you teach him how to fish, he can feed himself forever. ---Oriental wisdom When a German or American comes home in the evening, he wants his peace and quiet. That, at least, is the general rule. He sits down in front of the television, drinks his hard-earned beer and reads his newspaper, as if to say, "Leave me in peace. After working so hard, I have a right to it." For him, this is relaxation. In the East, a man relaxes in a different way. By the time he comes home, his wife has already invited a few guests, relatives, or family and business friends. By chatting with his guests, he feels relaxed, as though freely translating the motto "Guests are a gift from God." Relaxation can thus mean many things. There is no set definition for everything that relaxation comprises. People relax in the way they have learned how, and the way they hav~earned is what is customary in their family or group, or in the social circle to which they belong. Front Matter....Pages i-xvii Front Matter....Pages 1-1 About the Courage to Risk a Test....Pages 3-4 Folk Psychotherapy in the Mideast....Pages 5-6 The Thousand and One Nights....Pages 7-9 Positive Psychotherapy....Pages 10-20 Transcultural Psychotherapy....Pages 21-23 Stories as Instruments in Psychotherapy....Pages 24-25 The Functions of Stories....Pages 26-34 Guidelines for the Reader....Pages 35-36 Sources of the Stories....Pages 37-39 The Favorite Character in Mideastern Literature....Pages 40-41 Self-Discovery....Pages 42-43 Front Matter....Pages 45-45 Parables....Pages 47-62 Physicians’ Perplexity and Hope....Pages 63-81 Sexuality and Marriage....Pages 82-106 Stories in Psychotherapy....Pages 107-147 A Collection of Stories to Think About....Pages 148-156 Back Matter....Pages 157-167