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This collection of papers, most of which had been presentations and about half had been previously published, has as a central theme the author's longstanding curiosity about the subtext of conversation, behaviour, and all observations about human activity—the “hidden questions” of the title. He recounts his fascination with the observation that impelled him as a medical student to pursue psychiatric residency and then psychoanalytic training.
Dr. Gardner states in the foreword that the questions—some manifest, most hidden—over the course of four or five decades were a leitmotif that wove its way into all his writing, presentations, teaching, and clinical work. He notes that questions change as various theoretical issues—which occupy analysts at different times—come to the fore He states that the observation of the presence of the questions have “moved me to pay fuller attention both to them and to other of my questions (manifest and hidden), to my patient's questions. and to the forces that organize and are organized by such questions and such play” (p. xiii). He credits the heightening of attention for the change in the way he worked and thought about the workings of the mind. The collection of papers is meant to document the vicissitudes in the author's conceptions of the workings of the mind.
The interest for the reader is in the author's demonstration that the writing is layered, and reflects, over a period of time, the current preoccupations no matter what “topic” the author was asked to address, his current latent interests managed to colour or creep into it. He also applies the observation to clinical work, where the fantasies