In its more mature forms, it serves as an integrative agent and signifies both the possibility and the need to know, as well as the boundaries of knowledge. It is an essential element in the individual's psychic fabric and counterbalances splitting and projective identification. Hence, in analysis, it is vital to be constantly attentive to all the diverse expressions of curiosity or, conversely, to its absence. In the transference, the analyst, as well as the analytic setting, often become the aims of that curiosity and its containers. By allowing curiosity and surviving it, curiosity is transformed from an expression of destructiveness and disintegrating intrusiveness to a necessary prerequisite for psychological growth, self-discovery and creativity.
Several vignettes illustrate the impact of curiosity during therapy.
M.D. I t is important in these changing times to reconsider the psychoanalytic conception of the unconscious and the phantasmal mental life that occupies it so that we can recalibrate our clinical work with it. It is the foundation of all our endeavors. Recent developments in neurobiology, combined with a more pragmatic intersubjective approach in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, have marginalized the status of the unconscious in the eyes of many mental health professionals. Moreover, considerations of realistic childhood traumata and neglect are being more and more counterposed to the traditional concept of the infantile neurosis. What is at stake is a dismissal of a concept that is till of enormous importance, yet one that has been too little understood.