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In a 1963 paper entitled “On being empty of oneself”, in relation to some clinical material, Enid Balint wrote:
… because of a lack of proper feedback, the child, as well as the environment, got poorer; this ultimately resulted in a void outside and an emptiness inside, with life only being lived in a fantastic and nightmare world dominated by id impulses, but out of touch with body sensations and feelings … The infant tried to communicate, but got no response: nothing came back, everything faded: nothing was fed back, or what came back was not an echo or a response to what the infant felt or was trying to communicate. This lifeless relationship with the environment continued until a breakdown occurred … (Balint, 1993, p. 52)
This is a description of a child about whom no one was curious, whose attempts to communicate aroused no curiosity nor got any response. Nothing was fed back. Bodily sensations and feelings were not recognised, no attempt was made to try to understand. No one was asking, “what's going on here?”, let alone “what's really going on here?”. The emptiness outside resulted in a void inside. Such a child would struggle to develop a mind of their own. Enid Balint refers to there being “a breakdown”; such an infant would struggle to establish relationships, other than, perhaps, those that were parasitic, sadomasochistic, or violent.
This lecture, in part echoing the title of Enid Balint's paper, “On being empty of oneself”, invites us to consider how we create a sense of a self, and how we establish a mind of our own, capable of being in contact with reality and able to establish healthy relationships.
The lecture, and the title of the book from which it is drawn—The Curiosity Drive: Our Need for Inquisitive Thinking (Stokoe, 2020)—argues that what is essential in human growth and development is the relationship between curiosity, reality, and development. This is spelt out in the second part of the title of the book. An exploration and discussion of this i