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(1993). Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, 1:85-103

The Need to Know and the Inability to Tolerate Not Knowing

Blema S. Steinberg

Curiosity killed the cat Satisfaction brought it back

— Proverb, Northeastern United States

While I do suppose that neither of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is — for he knows nothing and thinks that he knows; I neither know nor think that I know.

— Plato, Apology

The obstacles to discovery [are] the illusions of knowledge

— Daniel J Boorstin, The Discoverers

Psychoanalytic theory has contributed much to an understanding both of the origins of the epistemophilic instinct — variously defined as the instinct of curiosity, the drive for knowledge, and the struggle for mastery — and of one of its significant aberrations, the inability to tolerate not knowing. As even a cursory examination of the psychoanalytic literature suggests, the vicissitudes of the need to know appear to take three major forms: some studies focus on the inability to know and the psychological determinants of learning disabilities; others emphasize the need not to know and the psychological inability to tolerate knowing; and still others stress the opposite side of the coin, a hyper-cathexis of the drive to know — a psychological inability to tolerate not knowing This paper will focus on the third type of vicissitude and on some psychoanalytic contributions to our understanding of it.

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