Near the end of the latest Got Therapy?, I asked Dr. Dan Rose a question I'd never heard put directly: "I don't know if we assess that in therapy." I meant curiosity: the client's, and ours.
Here is the position: curiosity isn't a personality perk. It's a clinical capacity that can be assessed, modeled and cultivated, and a field under pressure to be quick and symptom-based is at risk of training it out of us.
Dan's answer starts in psychodynamic practice. "If someone is defended, they're at least incurious about the thing they're defending against." A defense, on this view, is a pocket of not-wanting-to-know. And so "becoming curious is the first step to the potential resolution of that defense." The clinician's job is to "create an environment of loving curiosity about one's inner experience."
That changes how ordinary moments read. When a session opens with "I have nothing to talk about," Dan hears "a way to tap the brake," a question of whether it's safe. The curious response is to wonder together "why right now it's hard to start."
Curiosity also has a range. Dan called it "a specific form of metacognitive activity." At one end is naming a feeling. At the other end, which he calls the aesthetic, "you don't just name the emotion. You lean into it in the way that you would a poem, a movie, a book." He means this as a skill: "that's something to be cultivated."
The pressure runs the other way. Dan sees "a push to work as quickly as possible and to be symptom-based," and he doesn't sneer at it: helping depressive symptoms "abate" is the goal. But the founding models also aimed at "building a viable self," and he wonders how often today's training still emphasizes personal growth at all.
Nor should anyone think curiosity is automatically benign. Dan's own caution: "certain forms of curiosity can be entrenching." You can be curious in order to sort, label and win. That is why it has to be trained and supervised, not just praised.
There's also a modeling argument. I said on the show that the therapist's curiosity is "modeling too": the therapist is "naturally curious about the client coming in," and that "serves maybe as a model for the client to begin to kind of think about themselves."
So the question I asked deserves a real answer. If curiosity is where the work on a defense begins, it belongs in how we assess clients, how we supervise, and how we train, not just in how we describe a good clinician afterward.
Dan put it best, about a car he doesn't need: "See, I should be curious about why I want one." That's not a punchline. It's the method.
Michael Baltimore co-hosts Got Therapy? with Dan Rose Psy.D. on Columbus Television.