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The first and simplest emotion which we discover in the human mind is curiosity.
Every vocational career has its limitations and its own particular perils. For us as analytic practitioners, boredom is one of the most ubiquitous and untoward. Yet, the vast volume of material examining clinical practice has largely ignored boredom. Those who write about psychoanalysis appear to have made the tacit assumption that once an analyst has acquired clinical skills, he or she should be able to remain attentive and curious over a lifetime of practice. Those who have made this judgment have poorly served their colleagues. Severe ennui seriously afflicts a considerable number of practitioners, if not every analyst at some point in a full-time practice.
In that people who are drawn to practicing psychoanalysis are generally highly stimulated by and responsive to the inner life, a state of boredom stands in sharp contrast to their usual way of being-in-the-world. It usually indicates that they have lost touch with the goals, purposes, and directions with which they entered their career, such as gaining important realizations about oneself by learning from clients. As such, boredom represents the externalization of personal satisfactions that formerly the practitioner sought within himself or herself and from an exploration of the inner promptings of other people, whom the analyst came to know intimately (Goldberg, 1991).
Curiosity, as well as boredom, has been a neglected subject in the psychoanalytic literature. Freud, for example, never addressed the issue of curiosity systematically (Nersessian, 1995). Freud's interest (1905, 1909)