It was a low-key evening. We scootched together two couches in the living room, making a rather grown up playpen in the middle, and from that vantage point, with blankets and pillows, we cuddled and watched TV. We decided to watch 'The Wizard of Oz', and on the DVD were some special features. Since we'd seen the movie many times already, we opted to watch the documentary on the life of L. Frank Baum.

The Wikipedia has a nice summary of what we watched: Lyman Frank Baum (May 15, 1856 – May 6, 1919) was an American author, poet, playwright, actor and independent filmmaker, best known today as the creator, along with illustrator W. W. Denslow, of one of the most popular books in American children's literature, 'The Wonderful Wizard of Oz'. He wrote 13 sequels, nine other fantasy novels, and a plethora of other works (55 novels in total … 82 short stories, over 200 poems, an unknown number of scripts, and many miscellaneous writings), and made numerous attempts to bring his works to the stage and screen.

Evidently, his works predicted such common developments as colour television, laptop computers, wireless telephones, and the ever-present advertising one sees on clothing.

What struck me about Frank Baum is that he was an imaginative, creative person who indulged his curiosities and tried out his ideas. When he was putting together his novels, he would gather children around him and orally tell them the stories, watching to see what parts resonated with the children and what parts did not. He would rise in the middle of the night and write his ideas down on the wallpaper of the house. Sometimes he wrote them on his own clothes. I know the joy of oral storytelling, because that is what I used to do with children when I was a Minister of Children in the central valley of California, and I know the gleam in their eyes when curiosity and imagination came together in a vivid narrative. You could not get them to sit still if you chained them up to a post, but if you started telling a story, they would all come sit in front of you long enough to see if it had any zest. That is the way it was at Frank Baum's house; all the neighborhood children could be found there listening to stories.

Now, curiosity may have killed the cat (my apologies to cat lovers), but it serves human beings well. In looking through the research literature I came across a couple of interesting studies.

In an article titled 'Is Curiosity Vanishing?' which appeared in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, Susan Engel posed some thought-provoking considerations. The abstract of her study, appearing in the PsycInfo database, included a great description of the values of play, fantasy, storytelling, and curiosity.

Like toddlers, preschoolers are determined experimentalists, testing hypotheses, exploring new environments, and figuring out how things work. Their need to resolve uncertainty and explain the unexpected is the engine of early cognitive development. One of the vital functions of play is to provide children with a framework within which to explore and master experiences they do not fully understand. Similarly, children tell stories as a way of figuring out everyday experiences that seem exciting, mysterious, scary, and unknown. In other words, young children spend a large portion of their day engaging in activities well suited to satisfying their curiosity. Curiosity is not simply engagement per se but a way of questioning things that requires unscripted interactions and an ability to follow a line of inquiry into unknown places, to see where it goes, and to see what happens. Curiosity is not merely the natural byproduct of a friendly or flexible classroom. It needs to be actively encouraged and valued in ways that are visible to children. In relationships curiosity is motivational and pleasurable; according to Heidi Levitt and her colleagues, in and article appearing in the Journal of Constructivist Psychology, it leads to deeper understandings of interpersonal differences and an enriched sense of identity.

What I know about the value of curiosity also comes from being a therapist. Good therapists allow themselves indulgences that would not be polite (or even legal) outside the clinical hour, and two of these are voyeurism and curiosity. A therapist must play at them. Because therapists construct models that explain, that is, they tell themselves 'stories' about the people with whom they meet in order to do the very things children do (find ways of figuring out the experience of being with the client, an experience that is sometimes exciting, mysterious, scary, and unknown), therapists must be good at observing, and they must have something that leads them to pay attention to one thing as opposed to another in what they observe. That something is curiosity.

It sounds weird to say that a therapist must enjoy watching his or her client. The main goal, as most understand, is to simply be with the client so as to develop a therapeutic relationship characterised by trust. Still, although there is "being with" in the relational sense of two subjects interacting, there must also be the "being with" of one subject (the therapist) observing someone (the client) who is then almost like an object, an instrument one uses to scratch an itch, and that itch is curiosity. That sounds horrible, and of course that is not all there is to it. Regardless, therapists must become good at observing their clients, and as they observe, they must also, then, be willing to wonder "how", "why", "in what way", "where", "with whom", "when" and so on with reference to what they observe. If these things do not happen as the therapist is with the client, then all that is left is a perfunctory matching of symptoms with techniques from a therapist's bag of tricks, all in the hope that something might catch hold and help. It is curiosity within a therapeutic relationship that lets the unique being of the client lead the therapist into productive territory.

Come to think of it, curiosity is what brought my wife and I to push the couches together and create our own productive territory. Now, what I am curious about is where our guests might sit the next time we have someone over!