The wooden shell. The legend as representative of the early stage of development.

Legends serve as an important means of expressing fears, wishes, and fantasies. One of the best known and beloved legends worldwide is the nineteenth-century tale of Pinocchio, the wooden puppet who becomes a "real boy," or, as eventually becomes apparent, the boy enclosed in a wooden shell. This protective shell is an extremely interesting symbol and may be the reason the story holds a special place in the human experience.

Correlation of work structure and job satisfaction among Israeli family physicians.

Background: Physicians need a professional environment that is conducive to efficient and satisfying work. Little has been published about the effect of work structure on the satisfaction that family physicians derive from their work.

Objectives: To assess the structure and the positive and negative job components of family physicians in Israel, as well as the effect of these components on their satisfaction with their work.

Psychiatric liaison with a primary care clinic--14 years' experience.

An analysis is presented of the experience of a psychiatric liaison team that visited one primary care community health center on a monthly basis for 14 years. The content of the liaison changed character over time, starting as a teaching relationship and developing successively into case discussions, tripartite consultations with joint interviews, a satellite psychiatric clinic, a Balint group, observation of routine general practice consultations and, finally joint assessments of video-tapes of routine consultations. The primary care team of nurses and doctors developed insight into the complexities of their relationships with each other and with their patients.

Working through the experience of time in time-limited therapy.

The experience of time is a component in the psychic reality that can be understood from four standpoints: the cognitive, the dynamic, the existential-affective, and the life-span linked. This article presents a time-limited therapy in which the stress was on the constant interaction between the therapeutic content, which focused on the topic of time, and the singular setting of time-limited therapy. The discussion addresses the requisite conditions for turning short-term therapy into an active container for working through the sense of time, its meanings and its derivatives.