Essay · October 2026

Fish Is Fish

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.

I tried to remember a moment when I was the fish myself.
No single moment comes to mind right now.
Perhaps because there are too many.

When I listen to someone, in the practice or at home, a picture forms in me.
It is built from what I know.
This does not happen now and then. It happens in every conversation.
All I can change is whether I expect it.

The fish takes his picture for the world.
Gunther Schmidt expects his picture to be wearing a hat that the other person does not have – 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.