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All Who Dive
On Camels, Water, and Therapy
“I love all men who dive. Any fish can swim near the surface, but it takes a great whale to go down stairs file miles or more; and if he don’t attain the bottom, why, all the lead in Galena can’t fashion the plummet that will. I’m not talking of Mr. [Ralph Waldo] Emerson now, but of the whole corps of thought-divers that have been diving and coming up again with blood-shot eyes since the world began.”
— Herman Melville, personal letter (3 March 1849)
There is an old story I have been thinking about for a while, especially as a therapist in training, of which Heinz von Foerster and many systemic writers tend to be quite fond:
A wise person was out riding his camel when he came across three brothers arguing amid several camels of their own. The sage stops and asks them what is troubling them.
“Our father has died,” says the eldest brother, “and he has left us 17 camels.”
“Tragic, but a generous inheritance,” the wise person replies.
“Were it so simple,” the eldest brother laments. “You see, with these camels came instructions: I am to receive half of the inheritance, my younger brother a third, and my youngest brother a ninth. What is half of 17 camels?”
Listening deeply, the wise person thought carefully. After some time, the wise person dismounted and added his own camel to the lot of 17 others.
“There, give that a shot.”
The brothers did as the wise person asked: the eldest brother took 9 of the 18 camels, the next youngest took 6, and the youngest brother took 2. And as the brothers celebrated the conclusion of their conundrum in awe, the wise person wordlessly mounted the one remaining camel — his own — and rode off.
Interestingly, this story exists in a few different versions, varying not only in characters but numbers. What they hold in common is an insoluble problem, the entrance of a simple foreign element and the alteration of the original problem, the problem’s resolution, and the departure of that foreign element.
Therapy as a professional field is loaded with countless theories, models, modalities, techniques, and no shortage of brands — many of which even…
