What Makes a Good Question?

ONE DAY A SUPERVISEE PRESENTED TO ME a dream that had been reported to him by his patient, who was also a young man. In the

dream the patient was urinating in a bathroom in the clinic in which the treatment took place when the analyst suddenly entered. The patient reported feeling embarrassed, because the analyst saw the patient's penis and—so the patient believed in the dream—probably thought it was small.

The supervisee reported that he had then asked the patient what had embarrassed him about the perception in the dream that the analyst thought he had a small penis. Nothing much had come of this perfectly reasonable line of inquiry, however. The patient had responded by saying something like, "Well, I don't know exactly what you mean. Wouldn't anyone have been embarrassed?" This had been said without rancor, seemingly consistent with the ongoing collaborative atmosphere. In the face of such reasonableness, the supervisee had thought at that moment that the patient had a point, and he (the supervisee) simply could not see a way to take the inquiry further. He was stymied, though he did have the firm impression that he was missing something. It seemed to me, in listening to the supervisee's description of the situation, that he had held a preconceived understanding of the significance of the patient's feelings about penis size. Without realizing it, the supervisee had probably assumed the direction the inquiry would take. In retrospect he could see that he had identified with the patient's reluctance to explore the dream. He was interested in this idea, and we discussed it for a time, trying to spell out the countertransference implications. Eventually, though, we returned to the first intervention, the question about the patient's embarrassment, and the superv