From Curiosity to the Capability to Think: Elements of a Clinical Experience

The containing-transformative function of the psychoanalytic relationship appears in detail in the analysis of a child: I shall consider certain aspects of our experience together in the first two years of analytical work. This work was largely characterized by what in common sense language is described as “curiosity”. I, too, will adopt this use of the term with reference to the setting, fully aware that I am leaving aside what psychoanalytic debate has said about the origins, the nature and metapsychological status of the concept. It was interesting to see how, in the analysis of Michele, the phenomenon of curiosity, if considered as interest in the other, can serve to build ties and facilitate relationships, even when any investigation of the same can come close to intrusion. My approach to the phenomenon of curiosity, then, will be essentially from a relational vertex, thus requiring a recognition of one's own separate ego ( a, b). Curiosity — the patient's and the analyst's in the counter-transference — can create conditions favorable to exchanges between external objects, between internal objects, and between all these and the subject.