Editor's Introduction: The Human Need to Know

A discovery represents the fortunate culmination of the human need to know. This holds true regardless of whether the unearthed facts lie in our inner worlds or in the external reality surrounding us. Finding something is preceded by a desire (conscious or unconscious) to find it. Serendipity also plays a role in making discoveries. To acknowledge this is not to overlook the deeper psychological processes that might have led to the discovery (see Werman, 1977 regarding the relationship between psychologicalmindless and the capacity to believe in chance occurrences).

While serendipity is hardly a subject for psychoanalysis, the human need to know certainly is. Freud held a dual view of the origins of such need. On the one hand, he traced the roots of all curiosity to childhood desires to understand the nature of sexuality, pregnancy, and childbirth (Freud, 1908). On the other hand, he acknowledged a non-instinctual, ego-based need to know the nature of external reality; this was a component aim of the ego instincts (Freud, 1908). Freud's split vantage point led subsequent analysts to elaborate one or the other dimension of Freud's thought in this regard. Nunberg (1931) championed the infantile sexual origins of the desire to know while George Klein (1976) emphasized the ego's autonomous pleasure in knowing, understanding, and mastering reality. From a somewhat different perspective, Bion (1961) posited three premonitory drives, namely L, H, and K that referred, respectively, to the need to love and be loved, the need to hate and be hated, and the need to know and be known. Significantly, Bion included the need to know about internal reality and the nature of one's subjective experience alongside the need to understand external reality in his descriptions. Noting the divergence and complexities in this realm, Steinberg (1993) concluded that the human epistemophilic instinct is multiply-determined with contributions from both conscious and unconscious as well as instinc