On friendship and understanding
One of my favourite children’s books is Fish Is Fish by Leo Lionni. A fish and a tadpole have been friends for as long as they can remember. Then the tadpole begins to change. First little legs. Then the tail disappears. It becomes a frog, and one day the frog leaves the pond.
The fish stays behind. When the frog comes back, he has a great deal to tell. About birds. About cows. About people. The fish listens, and in thought bubbles above him appears what takes shape inside him as he does: a bird as a fish with wings, a cow as a fish with udders, a person as a fish with a hat and a walking stick, upright on its tail fin.
Every detail is there. Wings, udders, hat – nothing is missing from what he imagines. Only the basic shape stays the same in the end: that of a fish. He has no other material to build something new from than what he already is. The frog has no idea. He tells what he has seen and assumes that it has come across.
This is not only true of fish. Something we do not know becomes, in our imagination, a variant of what is familiar to us. There is no other way. Mostly we notice it as little as the fish does.
Someone who does notice it, and says so, is Dr Gunther Schmidt, a physician and psychotherapist from whom I have learnt a great deal. He says he never assumes that he understands a client exactly as that person experiences themselves – for that, he would have had to live through what the other person has lived through. And he does not treat this as a shortcoming to be put right.
The difference between the fish and the way Gunther Schmidt deals with this is not that one turns the unfamiliar into something of his own and the other does not. Both do, and no amount of questions changes that. The difference lies in whether you know it. The fish takes his picture for the world. Schmidt reckons with the possibility that his picture is wearing a hat that does not exist for the other person – and so he stays open to what he does not know.
Frog and fish remain friends all the same. The fish imagined the world beyond the pond completely wrongly – fish with feathers, fish with hats. It took nothing away from the friendship. Sometimes that is enough, too.
Leo Lionni – Fish Is Fish
Dr Gunther Schmidt is Medical Director of the sysTelios Klinik (in German) in Siedelsbrunn and head of the Milton Erickson Institute in Heidelberg (in German), where I have trained several times.
More about Gunther Schmidt: Wikipedia (in German)