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The Curiosity Drive is more than the result of Philip Stokoe's use of his curiosity and ability to learn from experience. It is also an outcome of his generosity. This is an open, giving, and at times powerfully moving work. The reader is offered a wide range of the author's professional experiences, the insights he has gained from them, the theoretical and assessment models he has built, and how he has used all this in his psychoanalytic work. The latter includes work with individuals, consultancy to organisations, and handling of complaints procedures, as well as heading a unit of a youth treatment centre and later the adult department of the Tavistock Clinic.
The first three chapters of the book offer a detailed description of the development of the conscious mind, a step-by-step process of learning from experience. This description highlights the centrality of and necessity for curiosity in this process, from infancy to adulthood. It sees curiosity as allowing us to build images of ourselves, in relation to others, as “explanations” of what is happening to us and as providing meaning to our experiences.
Infancy is covered in the initial chapter. The second chapter presents a background to, and subsequent discussion of, the drives of love, hate, and curiosity and their interplay. Here it is argued that without curiosity there would be no movement from early paranoid-schizoid functioning to