Under favorable conditions the power of the creative listener to enlarge and to remake a personality is not capable of limit. The people whom I most often help are the people for whom I do nothing. They tell their tale, spread it all out before me; then they see the solution themselves. Just to state our difficulties clearly to another person who will listen not merely sympathetically but creatively, and with resistance as well as furtherance, is of value. With certain people we run against a stone wall every now and then, even though they are only listening silently. This is right and helpful. The right kind of listening is sympathetic when it ought to be and dissenting when it ought to be. We help people out of trouble in other ways also; often by bringing new facts. A person tells us about his difficulties at work. He sees it perhaps more clearly after he has talked about it. But he may not know some facts that we know, and therefore we may be able to help in some ways that go beyond creative listening. But in the end a person has to make his own decision, to find his own solution; and in many cases he will find it without any more active or physical help than this. 5. _The case-worker's pyramid in social treatment_ It might well be objected by any thoughtful reader that if a person carried out the physical, economic, mental, moral, spiritual investigations that I have suggested in this book, he could take care of no more than one patient at a time, and would need years to finish up the tasks suggested by the history of that one person. That is an objection that certainly deserves an answer. I will begin my answer by a comparison with medical work. A trained physician is supposed to know something of all the organs in the body. Even a dentist or an oculist has had some training on all the bodily organs and not merely on the special ones he treats. Among the organs of the body, the medical profession is supposed to include the brain and all the functions of the brain. This implies that he is supposed to have at his finger-ends the ability to make an examination so complete that a whole day would be needed to finish it. Obviously if he attempted anything like that he would soon be overwhelmed. But on the other hand if he limits himself to the professional examination of a single organ, the one perhaps which the patient complains of, he does so at his peril. He is in danger of making a wholly wrong diagnosis. But that can be diminished only in proportion to his knowledge of all the other organs that he does not examine. A well-trained physician must and can safely do some superficial work. So a very well-trained social worker can and must do some superficial social work. In the practice of any doctor who counts up a month's patients we will say to one hundred, there will be about fifty that he has examined and treated very slightly. Then there may be twenty-five whom he knows a little more about, fifteen perhaps that he