The Role of Questions

ONE OF THE CENTRAL AIMS of psychoanalytic treatment is to increase the patient's curiosity about himself. In short, it involves an inquiry that links surface behavior to motives that are assumed to be more deeply placed, and an understanding of the derivative distorted remnants of childhood wishes that impinge upon our thoughts, images and interaction with others. In so many ways, a psychoanalysis is an inquiry—an inquiry by two people, both involved in understanding the mind and behavior of one of the parties of the dialogue. In order for this to take place, we adopt questioning attitudes about almost everything, including the apparently most banal of behaviors such as how one walks in the door, how one sits or lies down, how one greets the other, and certainly, why we talk about this or that rather than something else.

Inquiry however, is just one specie of a large array of possible other words which relate to the notion of a questioning attitude—a question, after all, is simply a grammatical form that bears a certain syntactic arrangement that is distinctive in each language. More important to us is how that syntactic arrangement—whether it is formed by prefixing a 'wh' question which involves inversion of subject and object or simply by a rising inflection that transforms a declarative sentence into a question—affects the listener. The syntax, it seems, carries semantic importance in how it is referenced and redecoded by both the speaker and the auditor, or the analyst and the analysand. In fact, we have so many varied words in English for the word, question, and each carries very different significance and meaning. We ought to review some of them so that we can become aware of the range of distorted reception that may be evoked in a patient by merely being asked a question. The habitual response of the patient to our questions leads us to accept the notion that the intention may not be very