Madness and psychotherapy through the looking glass: the case of King Shahryar’s ma(d)gic internal wound and fair(y) Scheherazade Alexandra Cheira Abstract A Thousand and One Nights is a very interesting case study of subversion, in which gender, space and time play a central part. In fact, in this collection of Middle Eastern and South Asian stories and folk tales compiled as far back as the 9 th century in Arabic by various authors, Scheherazade’s primacy may seem quite odd in view of the patriarchal nature of Arabian culture unless one recalls that in Muslim culture women were rather more powerful in medieval Cairo and Baghdad than they are thought to be. The frame narrative details King Shahryar’s betrayal by his wife and his subsequent revenge on all his one-day wives finally cancelled by Scheherazade, who willingly sets herself as “a ransom for the virgin daughters of Moslems and the cause of their deliverance from his hands” : on first learning that his younger brother had killed his wife shortly after he discovered she had betrayed him, King Shahryar actually claims that he “would not have been satisfied without slaying a thousand women and that way madness lies”. Until he meets Scheherazade, his bloodlust is twofold: he first kills the virgin on their wedding night as proof that she has not betrayed him, and then kills the woman to ensure she will never betray him. In this paper, I argue that a very particular talking cure is deftly carried out by the first female psychotherapist in history, a woman who challenges the gendered passive role of female listener/ patient by replacing it with the active role of female storyteller/ therapist. Without ever seeming to defy male power and apparently playing by Shahryar’s book, Scheherazade structures her storytelling sessions so that she reaches a particularly interesting narrative situation which is left unfinished due to the approaching dawn, thus encouraging the king to constructively daydream by freeing the creative part of his mind that helps him find his own solutions. This is the ultimate goal of both psychotherapy and fairy tales, so it is small wonder that the tales Scheherazade tells are fairy tales: the therapeutic aim of these storytelling sessions is thus effectively enhanced by the content of the tales themselves. Therefore, Scheherazade gradually changes the madness of sexual jealousy due to the belief that all women are cheaters in the making into the cure of understanding that an individual woman does not embody all women. By passing on the millennial wisdom of her tales, she cures