Fundamentals of Therapy can be read as a modern book, a mystery book, or even like a book of fairy tales. The chapters are like colors of a rainbow or notes of a musical scale—they are not formulaic; the book is not an encyclopedia of anthroposophic medicine. Instead, by working with the relationships that are presented, it is an orientation for moving our thinking in special ways. This is especially needed for younger people—those in college, high school, or grade school—because they are entering a world of thought that is, and is going to be, dramatically different from what we’ve experienced.
There’s a kind of hunger that’s arising for how to think in true ways. A young friend of mine was a Waldorf pupil through grade nine before she went to a regular school. She is now in college. She gets top grades and has no problem with academic learning, but about a year ago, she told me, “I feel like I haven’t used my brain in three years and it’s full of dust.” What kind of hunger emerges out of that dust? Several years ago, I held an online course about resilience for medical students who were interested in integrative medicine. At the end, they said, “This is so interesting, but it is complicated.” So I said, “Well, there are places you can read about it.” And they said, “No, we can’t read anything else. Is there a podcast that we could listen to? Sometimes when we’re walking or driving, it’s okay to listen to something.” So they’re very hungry but overwhelmed by so information that even something which could be truly nourishing for their well-being is too much. If we can find ways to meet the hunger, it is life-nourishment for people who know that there’s something more but don’t yet know how to think in expanded ways.
Movement to Resonance to Truth
Let’s say you need a beautiful love poem. Maybe for someone you really like. How might you find one? Nowadays, you could do an internet search. If you ask ChatGPT for the best love poem, it will give you an answer immediately. You might say, “That’s very nice, but I don’t know what it means,” and ChatGPT will instantly give you an answer on what the poem means. There are so many poems on the internet—it’s not hard to find one. However, if the poem is on the internet, it’s stored, but it doesn’t really live until you’ve read it, maybe several times. The first few times, you just hear the words, then you start to understand what’s there. Now your thinking is in movement. Then, if you really like the poem or find it interesting, you might feel: “I don’t know how the person who wrote this knew what I was thinking or feeling, but I can feel that it is true. It matches my own experience.” Now there is resonance.
Over time, you might even take another step and write your own love poem, something completely different from someone else’s. Then it’s your truth coming from out of your experience, and that’s very different from the nanosecond ChatGPT answer. We could say, now we have an aspect of truth.
Fundamentals of Therapy is such a fascinating book because it takes time to work with it. In the process that Michaela Glöckler and others developed for medical trainings, we often read the same three or four pages for 75 minutes for six days. People who are new to the process are astounded: what a waste of time. But at the end, they’ve moved their thinking and they start to feel, “This resonates in a special way.” They feel that now they have a relationship to it.
Enter Snow White
Where I live and work in Colorado, I held a series of weekend conferences on the case studies from Fundamentals of Therapy. For each weekend, we took one of the cases and read it together—no lectures. Then, we did therapeutic eurythmy, a nursing treatment, and an artistic exercise related to it. The first weekend was Case #1. Rudolf Steiner and Ita Wegman describe a young woman with anxiety, palpitations, back pain, and sleep problems. She wakes up abruptly, crying out; her path into consciousness is strong and hard. They write that it is clear from looking at her that the part of her organism that we call the astral body is in a state of excessive activity—the astral body is inadequately controlled by the ‘I’ organization. They indicate two remedies: copper and lead. “The ‘I’ organization needs to be strengthened and the activity of the astral body reduced. We achieve this with a medication like copper that supports the ‘I’ organization as it is weakened in the digestive tract.”
At the time, I was reading Henning Schramm’s book on the planets, the metals, and fairy tales.1 There’s a beautiful description of Snow White as a fairy tale for copper. So, for the last evening of that first case conference, we read the tale of Snow White. In it, there is a queen who is always looking at herself; she can’t stop obsessing over her beauty. She has a poisonous quality. Then there is young Snow White, who, to avoid being poisoned by the queen, has to go off to the realm of the hard-working dwarves. We agreed, yes, this story can be understood as an image of too much astral activity in the head and the senses, requiring something that warms and strengthens the activity in the digestion, the metabolism. It seemed to fit very well to Case #1.
Finding the Right Fairy Tale
The next year, we met again. People started contacting me: “Adam, we were so excited about the fairy tale. What’s it going to be this time?” I looked at the next case study, and there was no metal remedy indicated! I couldn’t draw on Henning Schramm’s wisdom. What do you do in that situation? I can tell you what I did: I read a Grimm’s fairy tale every night, trying to feel: “What is the fairy tale picture for this next case?” I found one and it worked pretty well. This happened several years in a row until we got to Case #8. I was stuck. It’s a case of goiter, or swollen thyroid. Steiner and Wegman describe a 34-year-old female patient who “is strongly influenced in her whole frame of mind by a certain heaviness and inner brittleness of the physical body. Every word she speaks seems to take an effort.” She has trouble sleeping. She says she feels not so much physically ill as psychologically ill. “A highly atonic state of the astral body is apparent,” they write. “Through this, the ‘I’ organization is held back from the physical and ether body.” The patient feels that she cannot hold the functions of her body together with her ‘I’—it’s an impotence of the soul. Quite different from Case #1. I puzzled over this and kept reading fairy tales until I found one that might fit.
A few weeks ago, in preparation for this talk, I did an experiment and asked ChatGPT: “Which fairy tale would go well with Case #8 in Rudolf Steiner’s Fundamentals of Therapy?” ChatGPT is never going to say, “I don’t know” or “I need to think about this.” It has no ability to move its thinking slowly, to consider and see what arises. Instead, it had an immediate suggestion: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs! And it gave me reasons: the patient is sleepy, Snow White goes to sleep; the patient is weak, Snow White is pale. I’m not making this up! It even gave me an anthroposophical perspective: “Rudolf Steiner emphasized the use of fairy tales as spiritual companions capable of guiding the soul toward healing and transformation.” And then assurance: “Fairy tales like Snow White, with themes of inner weakness and revival, serve as metaphors for the soul’s process of reawakening, perfectly aligning with Case #8.” But Case #8 is very different from Case #1, so I wrote back, “I don’t think that’s the right fairy tale. You are being too literal.” And ChatGPT said: “You’re absolutely right to question the literal match. Steiner’s therapeutic indications are deeply archetypal, so a symbolic or soul level resonance would be more appropriate than a surface analogy.”
Recently, I’ve been fortunate to work with a couple of art therapists, Linda Tippin and Sigrid Schenk. I told them, “I have this idea about Case #8 and a particular fairy tale. Would you look at these together and see if any images come up for you?” I was so happy with their painted responses to the fairy tale I’d chosen because it felt like the opposite side of a ChatGPT answer.
We might wonder: Is there one correct fairy tale for each case? I don’t think so, and I’m glad I did not keep track of which ones we chose, even though there seemed to be a match for each of the nine cases presented by Steiner and Wegman. I’m really happy instead to have it stay in a place of flexibility. It would be very easy to say “this is it!”—but then we’re jumping straight from question to answer. This is the fairy tale we worked with for Case #8:
The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes
There was once a king who had twelve daughters, each more beautiful than the other. The daughters slept together in one room. To keep them safe, the king locked their door each night. So he was mystified each morning when their slippers were in tatters from dancing all night. Finally, the king proclaimed that anyone who could tell him where his daughters went dancing every night could marry one of them and become king after him. The son of another king came to try. He was given a little room adjoining the daughters’ chamber so he could watch where they went. But he fell asleep, and when he woke in the morning, the slippers were again in tatters. This happened for a second and a third night. Unfortunately, the king had also proclaimed that if the person did not succeed in this task after three nights, they would lose their head. That fate befell the first suitor and then each suitor after him.
One day, a soldier who had been wounded and could no longer serve was wandering the streets. He met an old woman who asked him where he was going. He said he didn’t know and added, “I had half a mind to discover where the princesses dance their slippers into holes, and thus become King.” The old woman said, “That’s simple. Don’t drink the wine you are given and pretend to be asleep. Take this cloak to wear. It will make you invisible.” So, he thanked the old woman and went to the king. That evening, he was led to the little room next to the daughters’ chamber, and the oldest daughter gave him a goblet of wine. But he had tied a sponge under his chin so that he could appear to be drinking without swallowing a drop—it all went into the sponge. Then he lay down and pretended to snore. Once they thought he was asleep, the daughters put on their beautiful gowns and slippers. The eldest tapped on her bed, the floor opened, and they all went down a stairway. The soldier put on his cloak and followed them. They walked through forests of silver, golden, and diamond trees, and each time he took a few leaves. Finally, they came to a lake where twelve little boats and twelve handsome princes awaited. They crossed the water to a palace where they danced all night. When it was time to return, the soldier ran ahead, climbed into his bed, and began snoring. This happened for a second and a third night. When the hour arrived for his answer, the soldier went before the king and told his story, producing the silver, gold, and diamond leaves. The daughters were listening from behind a door and had to admit that this was true. The soldier married the eldest daughter and became king.
One of the people who regularly attended our weekend events was an important mentor for me and many doctors in the US, Philip Incao. (He’s now in the spiritual world.) Philip was a rather quiet person, but he listened to this story and at a certain point slapped his knee: “Adam, that’s definitely the right fairy tale!” Very relieved, I asked why. “The sponge!” he said. “Spongia is a fantastic treatment for goiter.”
In preparing for this talk, I thought a lot about thyroids and goiters, but for about six months, I had no patients with thyroid problems. I thought, “How am I going to do this?” The last day before I flew to Europe, a patient came with low thyroid, Hashimoto’s, and goiter. It was as if the spiritual world was saying: keep thinking. With this fairy tale in mind, I wondered: how do we get beyond our head and our intellect, into our feeling and our will? I thought about the ending of the fairy tale and how important it is to speak the truth. So I said to my patient, “Sometimes when there’s a thyroid problem, part of the background can be that it’s difficult for us to speak. Is that true for you?” English is not her first language, and she said, “You’re describing my whole life for the last 15 years.” It was true in terms of language, her relationships, and even her larger community. She always felt: “I know what I want to say, but I can’t. I hold back.” In that moment, I had the feeling that she had her answer for moving forward, and I almost didn’t need to prescribe any remedies. Sometimes there’s one little aspect that’s the key to making everything move.
The Slow Path to Truth
I share that story because it was a beautiful experience of trying to come to something through movement and gesture, and not worrying about the final answer. We are moving into a time when ChatGPT will always have an answer. But it won’t necessarily be “right.” I was listening to a podcast between New York Times journalist, Ezra Klein, and a young woman named Kyla Scanlon, on the “attention economy.”2 They said that we are at a stage where there is an overabundance of information—more than anyone could ever read or need—but a scarcity of truth. The young people who are coming towards us need truth—slow truth. They need to write their own love poems. I think many of us have had the experience that the therapies, colors, tones, and medicines which we love are the ones that work best for us. The same medicine won’t necessarily have the same effect for someone else—it’s not just about substance but also about movement and resonance.
What is the sponge that each of us can use? We have a world where too much information is coming—so much that people are actually a little allergic to it, especially if they don’t understand the motive behind it. It can be very hard to approach Anthroposophic ideas. But when people can move their thinking, they say, “I love this more than anything.” People stay with anthroposophic therapies because they can feel the truthfulness.
We can take any part of Fundamentals of Therapy and work with it using rhythm and repetition, and it unfolds on these same levels. We could just as easily have said “imagination” instead of “movement,” “inspiration” instead of “resonance,” and “intuition” instead of “truth.” When we are moving our thinking, we’re coming into relationship with spiritual beings. When we get to the level of intuition, we are a spiritual being among spiritual beings, and these therapeutic aspects become our friends. The hunger that is approaching is a huge opportunity, but we have to do things differently. Yes, it’s hard to go through the entire process every time. In learning anthroposophy, sometimes someone tells us “There’s this and it equals this”—and maybe that’s a bit of a relief, but it’s best when we learn to make the movement ourselves. When possible, we need to be open to accompany people, to help create listening spaces, and to practice moving our thinking in enlivened ways. This will be a real gift for the world.
This is a lightly edited excerpt from a talk given at “Extending the Art of Healing: Etheric Forces as Forces for the Future,” the 2025 Medical Section Conference at the Goetheanum. The entire talk, “Strengthened Force of Thought for the Future,” will be available on Goetheanum TV in February 2026.
Title image The Worn-Out Dancing Shoes – Sigrid Schenk
Footnotes
- Henning Schramm, The Healing Power of Planetary Metals in Anthroposophic and Homeopathic Medicine, Lindisfarne Books, 2013.
- Ezra Klein with Kyla Scanlon, “How the Attention Economy is Devouring Gen Z—and the Rest of Us.” The Ezra Klein Show, 8 July 2025. (also on Spotify, here.)
“No beginning without courage, no courage without truth.”
from The Virtues by
~Herbert Witzenmann