Feeling curious or the impulse to curiosity is an emotional impulse that underlies the desire to know something or someone. Then if “curiosity is an impulse or instinct similar to and as basic as the pleasure/pain impulses, then it is clearly not a matter of choice or determined by intention. I either feel pain or pleasure or I do not. I cannot be told to feel pain. Similarly, I either feel curious or I do not”, suggested Fisher (2006).

In fact, those people who come into analysis have no interest in why they feel as they do. In most cases, they have no curiosity impulse and are only interested in “getting rid of” painful experiences as soon as possible, routinely discarding and disposing of them without getting to the bottom of the reasons why they have such experiences.

Should they be explained that the scope of their curiosity is limited? What does elucidation of the limited scope of their curiosity entail? And why would “showing” patients that they are not curious about their emotional experience lead to their wanting to know? And then how to show it

“First, curiosity tends to be contagious. Otherwise, psychoanalysis would be impossible. It would be some form of instruction, showing patients their lack of curiosity, and elucidating their lack of interest in their emotional experience. Fortunately, it is possible to be curious with patients about their apparent lack of curiosity in the hope that, since curiosity is contagious, they might too begin to wonder.

The second feature of the emotional experience of curiosity is closely related. Supposing I am in a session with the most difficult of dynamics and I notice that I am no longer curious. When the reality is that I do not feel curious, telling myself that I ought to feel curious is useless. But my noticing, my attention being focused on that observation of my own state of mind, gives me an outside chance of triggering an emotional experience of curiosity in myself.

Perhaps it would be better to describe my attending to my own state of mind here as involving an awareness of an internal object that is curious about me and my lack of curiosity. An internal object that takes in my fear or envy or whatever and yet remains in a state of wanting to know. An internal container-in-K with which I can become identified and thus curious, wanting to know.

This surely is the essence of psychoanalysis, the opening up of the analyst to the emotional experience of wanting to know the patient, thus making possible by the patient's internalization of this relationship, a wanting, and being able, to know oneself. Psychoanalysis is an emotional experience of knowing, as is, for example, parenting, friendship, being in love”.

Reflections on the article by James Fisher (2006) “The Emotional Experience of K” // The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, (87)(5):1221-1237.