Fear Is Not A Good Teacher. The

Wherever A Story Comes From, Whether It Is A Familiar Myth Or A Private Memory, The Retelling Exemplifies The Making Of A Connection From One Pattern To Another: A Potential Translation In Which Narrative Becomes Parable And The Once Upon A Time Comes To Stand For Some Renascent Truth. This Approach Applies To All The Incidents Of Everyday Life: The Phrase In The Newspaper, The Endearing Or Infuriating Game Of A Toddler, The Misunderstanding At The Office. Our Species Thinks In Metaphors And Learns Through Stories.

Insight, I Believe, Refers To The Depth Of Understanding That Comes By Setting Experiences, Yours And Mine, Familiar And Exotic, New And Old, Side By Side, Learning By Letting Them Speak To One Another.

Traditionally In American Society, Men Have Been Trained For Both Competition And Teamwork Through Sports, While Women Have Been Reared To Merge Their Welfare With That Of The Family, With Fewer Opportunities For Either Independence Or Other Team Identifications, And Fewer Challenges To Direct Competition. In Effect, Women Have Been Circumscribed Within That Unit Where The Benefit Of One Is Most Easily Believed To Be The Benefit Of All.

When Any Relationship Is Characterized By Difference, Particularly A Disparity In Power, There Remains A Tendency To Model It On The Parent-child-relationship. Even Protectiveness And Benevolence Toward The Poor, Toward Minorities, And Especially Toward Women Have Involved Equating Them With Children.

Solutions To Problems Often Depend Upon How They're Defined.