On a cold winter day, a group of porcupines huddled closely together to protect themselves from freezing through mutual warmth. However, they soon felt each other's quills, which pushed them apart again. As the need for warmth brought them closer once more, this second discomfort repeated itself, causing them to be tossed back and forth between both pains until they found a suitable distance from one another, where they could endure best. Arthur Schopenhauer (1874) Schopenhauer's fable about the distance problems between people serves as a starting point for Deborah Anna Luepnitz to address issues we all encounter in everyday life: she describes stories from her psychoanalytic work, in which people deal with panic attacks, psychosomatic disorders, and marital problems, for example.