On Curiosity [1]
Some introductory words
A few months ago I read a book written by Annie Reiner, an American psychoanalyst, who met Bion in Los Angels in the 70's, so she had first hand experience of him. She wrote a book about the concept "O". It's a central concept in Bion's theories, very elusive and I won't get much into it, but the book is relevant to this presentation, since, while reading her introductory chapter, I came across a paragraph that was for me like a good interpretation, organizing my intuitive feelings about my experience of reading Bion and some aspects of the spirit of his theories. Reiner wrote:
"Bion served as a fitting model for the idea that one can do no better than to keep on looking with curiosity, intuition, discipline and patience, in the hope of finding as many new questions as he did throughout his life, and with any luck, may be partial fleeting answers as well"
The quartet of: curiosity, patience, discipline and intuition seemed to hold for me the essence of the mental and emotional position of listening and working with a patient, with a manager, an interviewee when in the process of organizational diagnosis, or when consulting to a group. This quartet was immediately connected for me with the well known idea or dictum of technique "no memory, no desire and no understanding"; but the notion that "caught my eye" the most and triggered excitement in me was "curiosity". What is actually curiosity I wondered to myself? I thought of the bi-weekly meditation group that I take part in, where I experience myself as "curious" about the state of "observing my mind" when meditating, I thought of "friends" or family members who are only talking about themselves, almost never curious about the other. I recalled the course I taught in an MBA program – together with three other colleagues- where a presumptuous purpose for the course actually stated to the students was: "To develop a spirit of curiosity, inquisitiveness and the ability to stay in uncertainty".
When a few days later, I received a "call for presentations" for the International Gathering of Program, I decided to write "on curiosity"; not only on the concept, but on the possibility of actually developing ones curiosity, and connect it to training in organizational consultation from psychoanalytic-systemic approach, to training in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic oriented psychotherapy.
One might ask: Is it possible at all to develop curiosity? Isn't it something you either have or not?
The idea of developing curiosity is connected as I said, with the idea of nox3 (no memory, no desire, no understanding). While the notion of nox3 may seem to many as merely a kind of a Bionian, psychoanalytic slogan, is a position of mind which is a "real" – I tell my students and supervisees – and it could be learned and be developed.
How to develop it? How to teach it and help develop it is a challenge for us who teach in the psychoanalytic-systemic approach to consultancy and management or psychoanalysis. Since I think that curiosity – as well as patience and discipline – are associated with nox3, the question of developing them both is what I would want to try and talk about mainly using Bion's conceptualizations.
Bion's theories are a challenge for us. At times or rather often they get complicated and elusive; so let me outline the conceptual terrain I will be walking on in this presentation:
K———Curiosity———NOX3———Discipline, ——– Patience
Intuition
Let us with curiosity:
A colleague of mine whom I told about working on this presentation referred me to a book by Chorche Samfron . Samfron is a Spanish-French writer who was sent to Buchnwald – a concentration camp – around the age of 20 and most of his writings are associated with the experiences he had during the war. I begin my discussion with something he wrote about curiosity which I found moving, interesting and perhaps relevant to the importance curiosity might hold in life. He discusses the issue of survival in the concentration camps, and relates his experiences to Primo Lev's who wrote:
"Aside from arriving to the camp in good health and knowing German, aside from that, everything was luck….", and then he added:
"I remember that I lived that year in Auscwitz and I was there with "an unusual passion, and I don't know whether it stemmed from my professional training, from a power of resistance I didn't imagine having in me, or from a deep instinct. I didn't cease to look at the world and the people around me….I felt a powerful wish to understand, all the time I experienced this curiosity".
Samfron then concludes his own experience and says:
"I would add to the two objective elements – health and knowing German, a subjective element: curiosity. There is in the power of curiosity to assist you in a way that couldn't be evaluated exactly, but yet is decisive".
Being curious and surviving the horrors of the concentration camps – how do they go together? I am not sure how, but it brought for me the idea that curiosity could be a highly important aspect of being human, for staying human, and for Samfron and Levi also staying alive. For Bion curiosity is not about survival, but also very much connected with emotional health and development.
Let me go a bit deeper into curiosity:
Curiosity is generally referred to in the psychoanalytic literature as a term that stands for "a wish or a desire to know". One crucial question regarding curiosity is whether it's secondary to other human instincts or needs, like secondary or a derivative of sexuality, or is curiosity an autonomous function of us as human beings. Freud emphasized sexual curiosity. Klein coined the term epistemophilic instinct, which is an internal drive towards knowledge, yet, she seemed to mainly relate this "drive to know" to sexuality, envy, the parental couple, etc. There are others in the psychoanalytic field such as Hartman that already in 1939 conceptualized curiosity as an "ego function" that is not derived from instinctual drives but could be considered to have "primary autonomy". Theorists from related disciplines such as philosophy (Elias Baumgarten), or developmental psychology (Ryan and Deci) view curiosity as autonomous, as a trait, as part of us as humans.
Curiosity might be seen as belonging to a family of concepts that point to ways of gaining knowledge: concepts like taking interest, attentiveness, openness, receptivity; all belong to getting to "know things" externally or internally (Baumgarten). However, curiosity should perhaps be seen – and that's how I view it – not only as an "ego function but more as an instinctual entity (Klein, Bion) as an emotional state of mind that has the "energy" associated with a desire.
The desire to know – or curiosity – could be directed to numerous areas: it could be related to how babies come to the world, to mother's body, to father's body, and to an infinite number of questions that a child may ask his parent with the prefix "why?" (obviously the parent's reactions to their children's natural curiosity, may seriously affect what happens with curiosity in their later life). Curiosity could and is also directed towards endless areas such as: the nature of the universe, the meaning of life, any phenomena of nature, to technology, to science. Indeed, only recently a book has been published by Mario Livio – Israeli-American astrophysicist – entitled "Why? What Makes Us Curious." This book describes the notion of curiosity as something related to whatever is outside human relationships. In this presentation I will focus on curiosity as related to the relationship with another individual, with a group and as related to ourselves. Thus, I will explore curiosity as part of human interaction, part of work and as part of the human capacity for "learning from experience".
Imagine the nature of your experience when you are curious about a friend, a colleague, your child, and in this vein imagine your experience – what does it feel like – when these others are curious about you….
Bion and curiosity
Bion wrote little about curiosity, in fact very little has been written about curiosity in the psychoanalytic literature. However, the little Bion wrote he illuminates important aspects regarding the nature of curiosity.
He writes:
"I associated K with curiosity, but it is necessary to consider other impulses, emotions and instincts… which he referred to as related to ….. L and H and the effect of the intrusion of one group on the other"
What is then K?
The notion K or "K link" describes the emotional experience that is present when two people or two parts of the personality are related to each other. Bion selects three proto-typical emotions that are related to the link between two people: Love, Hate and Knowledge .
The K link is actually a desire to know the other, it is a state of expectation to know something which has not been realized yet, thus hasn't been put into a thought. Whereas H and L are clearly associated with emotions, the emotion associated with K is not apparent. Thus, in addition to the desire involved in K – and a desire does have an emotional and also physiological component – Bion adds another emotion to K, and that is pain. He regards the state of not knowing, of the reality of wanting to know the other – and what can we really know about the other, Bion wonders – a painful situation.
K is not a "piece of information" about the other; it is knowing the other in an emotional sense.
The K link stands for a process, a process of getting to know. K link doesn't carry a "sense of finality"; we are in continuing process of knowing the other. When we say something to the other that can be viewed as related to K – I say something to you that represents knowing you – it should be remembered that it's not final, that soon we may discover something different or new. Thus, the pain of "not knowing" continues, and we are than faced with the challenge of enduring that pain .
Grinberg et al (1975) in their introduction to the work of Bion write that:
"It is necessary to distinguish between the "possession of knowledge" as the result of a modification of pain in the K link (in which case the knowledge acquired will be employed for further discoveries) and the "possession of knowledge" that is used to evade the painful experience. The latter can be found to predominate in the omniscient part of the personality. In such a situation the establishment of a K link, and therefore of learning through experience, is precluded" (p.102).
As I write this paragraph I recall a large study group (LSG) session in a GRC (Group Relations conference) about 25 years ago where I was consulting to with two others. At a certain moment one of the consultants – a psychoanalyst – interpreted to the group that it is in "a psychotic state". I was still a novice at LSGs, but I was startled and felt that even if he that other consultant saw something that he thought was "psychotic", using this word in such a setting was a form of "possession of knowledge" – by a psychoanalyst – that was evading the pain and anxiety in not knowing what was going on and evading the pain I thought he was experiencing.
It is similar to a situation when in a session with a patient I say to myself at a difficult moment, "she is borderline"…I immediately know that it is "cursing", that it is not tolerating pain, that's not a K link.
K is not just about the other, but also about oneself. The K link can be directed towards knowing ourselves, getting in touch with "a truth" about ourselves.
The person on the receiving end of K, who is being known, has an emotional reaction. On a deep level we all want to be known (Ghent); it's more than just wanting to be understood, it's not just the need that the other will have "information" about us.
How is K associated with curiosity?
When curiosity relates to what is external to us, it could be about anything, but when it is related to another person – or a group of people – than we are dealing with the notion and dynamics associated with K link. As we said, K involves pain. Often this pain of knowing the other – or rather not knowing the other – is involved in coming to terms with something in us. Often it involves the ability to contain what's being projected into us and/or something related to vulnerabilities and anxieties we bring "from home".
I believe that to maintain a K link curiosity is required. To be in a K link, to maintain a K link, to be able to tolerate the pain associated with it, requires holding a basic state of curiosity; that is, a state of mind experienced as "a desire", a state of mind and an "emotional state" that has the "energy" associated with a desire to know to know the other or others.
What I am trying to say, is that, in order to maintain a K link, thus knowing the other in an emotional sense, we need to be curious about the other. Thus a K link and curiosity go together.
Bion claimed in the statement I quoted above that curiosity may be interfered by other "groups of emotions" related to Love and Hate. This brings me to the notion I refer to as "as if" curiosity.
"As if" curiosity
If curiosity is the wish to know, and the wish to know the "truth" or the "emotional truth" about onself and the other (Bion…), than proclaiming overtly or even to oneself, that "I am curios" is not necessarily curiosity. It could actually be anti curiosity, a wish not to know the truth, or in Bion's terms –K (minus K). Since curiosity like a state of K requires the tolerance for pain of not knowing – which in some circumstances is associated with not understanding – curiosity and getting to know then could arouse the pain of envy, the threat to once sense of worth and one's sense of identity. If there is no tolerance for these variations of pain, one will maneuver to evade this pain. One can then become judgmental, bored, devaluating etc.
In his article "On Arrogance" Bion describes a triad of "arrogance, curiosity and stupidity" that when appear, they "should be taken by the analyst as evidence that he is dealing with a psychological disaster". One might wonder why curiosity is an indication of a psychological disaster? but what perhaps Bion actually meant was that what might appear as "curiosity" is actually "as if" curiosity. It's a patient that may ask his therapist a question that may not stem from" real curiosity"; but from a position of wanting to undermine, to "get information" that will "prove" his assumption about his therapist. Thus, the patient is not "really curios". I suggest that such an expression of "as if curiosity" could be denoted as – curiosity ( minus curiosity). I am not focusing now on the pathological state that Bion writes about, but I believe that "– or "as if" curiosity" is a matter of everyday life, an occurrence that all of us find ourselves in. Perhaps it's not a very common state to be in curiosity, in what we might call "open curiosity", a receptive, evenly hovering state of curiosity, either with a friend, a colleague, a student, a class, a team we manage, a manager we consult to, a patient we work with, as well as our partners our children etc.
I told someone I write about curiosity, and he said about his wife – perhaps seriously, perhaps teasingly – that she is "a gossiper" not "a curious person". What is then the difference between gossip and curiosity? We might say that asking questions from a position of gossip is not just wanting to know, but wanting to know in order to devalue, to compare, to find the faults in others, to revile in the misfortune of the other etc. Sometimes there is a thin line between curiosity and gossip. Gossip can come under the heading of "as if" curiosity.
If we observe our mind when listening to a lecture or reading an article, or consulting, all occurances that we come into and might be aware of a position of being curious about the other, or about what we read or listen to, we might notice that our original "honest" curiosity is infiltrated by comparisons, by envy, by competition, by a threat to our identity, by a threat to our self worth, by anxiety of some sort; all put us into a position of "as if" curiosity, a state of mind which is not "open curiosity". In such a state of affairs our learning is hampered, our potential for discovering something new is prevented.
Can you imagine that while noticing in ourselves how our curiosity is turned into "as if" curiosity, we might bring it back to curiosity? I think it's possible? How to do it? I will discuss later when we deal with the question: "can curiosity be developed?"
The relationship between curiosity and nox3
Curiosity is a desire at knowing and/or understanding the other, oneself, a dynamics of a group etc, it may then require the ability to endure the pain of not knowing and not understanding. Bion theorizes that in order for new knowledge, a new thought, a new concept, a new understanding to "evolve" it is required to be in a state or a position of no memory, no desire and no understanding.
When we talk about knowing or understanding the "nature" of a person, a group, a phenomenon, or oneself, we need to mention the notion "O" that Bion conceptualized. O which is "absolute truth" or "the things in itself", or we might say "the essence of things" (what is the essence of me?) is according to Bion unknowable. We can get "close" to O, to know a derivative of O, of the "absolute truth". The notion of O and what revolves around it is elusive, difficult to understand, and I won't expand on it in this presentation, yet what's relevant to this presentation is that we are recommended by Bion to put aside "memory, desire and understanding". Being in a state of mind, or a position of listening (or reading) of nox3 allows "a pattern" to emerge, a pattern that turns into a thought, into a hypothesis of what might be happening.
Bion talks about the above in relation to psychoanalysis, in relation to the position the analyst should aspire to achieve.
I believe, that a position of nox3 is recommended or even required whenever we would want or need to "understand" a phenomenon or develop "new thoughts and ideas". It is therefore highly relevant to an organizational consultant when working with an individual or a group, small and large; or a teacher who is not just lecturing but bases his teaching also on a discussion with the students; or to a manager, when discussing an organizational issue with an individual or a team.
So what about NOX3 and Curiosity: At moments it may appear as undifferentiated, but I want to suggest that just trying to be in a state of NOX3 in a "technical" way, may not be enough or even possible to achieve or endure, without associated curiosity. If one lacks curiosity about the other, then trying to be in one's role in "the required" nox3 position will be infertile, it "will not really work".
Curiosity can also be conceived as the emotional and "energetic" – in a physiological sense – context in which we need to be in, in order to try and enter a state of nox3. We thus need to be, or hopefully be, curious about our patients, about our supervisees, about our consultees, about the team or group we work with. If we are not, we won't be truly able to enter and sustain the nox3 position. We might then be prevented from discovering new things, from "learning from experience". From the angle of the people we work with – patients, managers – we might hinder their development.
An additional way of comparing curiosity and nox3 is that curiosity can be looked at an "active" associated with the other or others. We are basically "other oriented. Whereas, nox3 is "more passive", it's more related to ourselves, to a receptive way of being towards what comes from the outside (a talk – associations – of a patient, consultee, team, or a lecture we listen to, or a paper or book we read).
Curiosity is an arrow forward – vertical; whereas nox3 is an arrow sideways – horizontal.
If we think we need to develop our own as well as our students' capacity for being in a position of nox3 in their role, then we need to develop their curiosity as well. A position of nox3 is a mode of listening. It is basically role related, and we would want to believe that we may acquire such a capacity. But curiosity as a human trait or inborn function is relevant everywhere, not just to our roles. To develop curiosity as a human capacity may seem much more difficult if at all possible.
Can Curiosity be developed?
Yes, I believe it can. For that to happen we need "discipline and patience".
A while ago I was reading an article written by a colleague I know. I was curious about the topic, I was curious about my colleague's thinking. That was curiosity – healthy or real curiosity. But as I started reading, it became complicated. I got into comparing my ideas to those in the article, at moments I felt envy and the pain involved in envy. I was swept by those emotions while "reading". But, at certain moments I became mindful. I said to myself: "observe your mind". I was able than to name my feelings at those moments: envy, threat, competition. As I was naming those, I came back to curiosity, or you might say open curiosity. It was a completely different experience of reading, of taking in ideas, of playing with the ideas presented; however, that didn't last for very long, and again I was swept into "as if" curiosity. I needed the discipline involved in observing my mind, in order to go back to curiosity, or rather "open curiosity". Such a way of working with oneself requires indeed discipline, patience but also training and practicing.
The same discipline is required to get oneself in a position of nox3. We can observe how we are being swept by memories, how desires creep into our mind, and how a thought "yes I understand it" takes over. It requires knowledge about the working of our mind, about being invaded by emotions – L(ove) and H(ate) in Bionian terms – and the need in our role to try and return to a nox3 position. With the experience and knowledge that we can – because we have been able to do it the past – we might be able to reach the position of "open curiosity" and nox3 that might accompany our curiosity.
We need to practice that, and in our roles as teachers we need to find ways of teaching it, and have our students or supervisees practice it.
I will take for example a paradigm of working with a supervision group either in psychotherapy/psychoanalysis or in organizational consultation. In such groups there is a presenter and a group working with what is presented. The group is asked to listen to the presenter silently (with open curiosity and nox3), and after the presenter finished and some clarifying questions by the group, the presenter is asked to listen silently (with open curiosity and nox3) to the group discussing what has been presented. Then the presenter is asked to share associations/reflections/new thoughts that emerged while listening to the group, and afterwards there is a continued open discussion by the group and presenter, all the above led by the teacher/group supervisor.
I use this paradigm when I work with groups on organizational consultation as well as on psychotherapy. All participants: presenter, the rest of the group, don't find the "instructions" easy to follow, some resist it, but eventually most appreciate the learning. I always add that such a mode of working requires patience and discipline. Recently I start such group work with a short introduction about curiosity and nox3. I present some central points of this presentation, including suggesting that they observe their mind while listening, and try to return from "as if" curiosity to "open curiosity".
In a supervision group with group psychologists who work in the educational systems, the presenter said in the review of meeting: "I realized how difficult it was for me to stay in a nox3 position and "open curiosity" but I had a few minutes that I was able". It seemed she had the experience and perhaps understood something about open curiosity and the nox3 position, and what they might mean/feel for her. She now had in her mental possession an experience of nox3 and open curiosity.
In another instance, I asked my individual supervisee in organizational consultation how was it to listen to the manager when he interviewed him, and I then could show him how his mind was filled with memories and "understandings", and how few – if at all – new ideas came to his mind. We could both notice how the interview remained in the format of "questions and answers" with little creative movement in it.
The principals of developing curiosity as well as the capacity for nox3 when working with students individually and with groups that I use sometimes is: short conceptual introduction and explanation, practice of observing one's mind and returning to open curiosity and nox3, reflection on the practice and more practice.
I remain uncertain with regard to what should we focus more or first when we practice: on curiosity or on nox3, or perhaps on both of them together? More experiences of doing it with people I work with are needed in order to have a better answer to this issue.
The practice and the experience
Having experiences when practicing – even short ones – of being in a state of open curiosity and nox3 is highly significant, since in having such experiences one has the internal knowledge that he "has been there", one "knows" he "can be there". The "faith" (Bion) is then strengthened that I can return to nox3 from memories, desire and understandings, and that I can return from "as if" curiosity to "open curiosity", even if for a few moments.
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[1] Based on a presentation given November 2017 at the International Gathering of Programs in Copenhagen.
