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It may come as no surprise to learn, after reading Philip Stokoe's book, that the word ‘curiosity’ derives from the Latin cura, care, or cure. Stokoe himself is less interested in etymological than in human roots. The opening chapters of this substantial, clearly argued and quietly passionate book rehearse a familiar Kleinian and Bionian account of the development of mind, from birth to adulthood; but Stokoe gives this story a new twist and new vitality by positing at its heart what, following Bion, he calls the K (i.e. knowledge) or curiosity drive. Without this, he argues, the story is incomplete. So he slows it down and gives it a ‘second look’ - just as the child, prompted not only by the pleasure principle but also by curiosity, grows and develops by giving her experience a second look.
Take feeding, for example. The good-enough mother, able to receive and identify with her baby's projections, realizes the baby is hungry, ‘at which point the baby has an … overwhelming emotional experience … a surge of satisfaction and love’ (p. 7). This, however, is more than he can manage. Curiosity impels him to ‘explain’ what is happening. Among things he has already discovered is that he can close his eyes to anything that feels ‘bad’, above all the presence of ‘the hunger monster’; now he opens his eyes, and confers a quality of ‘goodness’ onto the experience by enabling the feeding object itself to become suffused with the positive feelings that had threatened to be too much. It is a fascinating illustration of the role of the visual in building a permeable contact-barrier against experiences of being overwhelmed.
The experiences of feeling really good and really bad create the split that Klein called the paranoid-schizoid position; Stokoe, in his second look, rechristens it the ‘fundamentalist position’ (p. 12), seeing in it the exact components of Freud's pleasure principle. Envy, which Klein regarded as an expression of the death instinct, requires for Stokoe the recogni