Die Herausforderung des Fremden: Testfall der therapeutischen Beziehung

The experience of strangeness calls for 1) identity, 2) tolerance and liberality 3) the ability to accept things, and 4) a realism in understanding. In other words, we need what is strange as something that is totally different; in a very real (not just an ethical) sense it is necessary for our Jives. What matters then is how we plan to cope with this situation. The validity of our own moral rules and the universal ethos of helping is put into question. Demographic developments make this challenge a real one: the number of people from foreign cultures, their special states of illness, and the change of the old »nation« paradigm. Understanding the foreign patient means to empathise with his/her concrete difficulties in reaching a decision outside customary environment that could support it. Therefore we need to detail the rule of empathy and develop the insight that the strange is a part of ourselves.