As Nietzsche (who also credited boredom with breathing life into some of his most influential ideas) put it, “for thinkers and sensitive spirits, boredom is that disagreeable windless calm of the soul that precedes a happy voyage and cheerful winds.

S. Mann and R. Cadman, “Does being bored make us more creative?,” Creativity Research Journal 26 (2), 2014, 165–73; J. D. Eastwood, C. Cavaliere, S. A. Fahlman, and A. E. Eastwood, “A desire for desires: Boredom and its relation to alexithymia,” Personality and Individual Differences 42, 2007, 1035–45; K. Gasper and B. L. Middlewood, “Approaching novel thoughts: Understanding why elation and boredom promote associative thought more than distress and relaxation,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 52, 2014, 50–7; M. F. Kets de Vries, “Doing nothing and nothing to do: The hidden value of empty time and boredom,” INSEAD, Faculty and Research Working Paper, 2014.

Boredom can be a useful tool for a psychoanalyst. It can be a sign that the patient is avoiding a particular subject; that he or she is unable to talk directly about something intimate or embarrassing. Or it can mean that patient and psychoanalyst are stuck; the patient is returning again and again to some desire or grievance that the psychoanalyst is failing to tackle. A boring person might be feeling envious, and might kill a conversation – disrupting it or paralysing it – because he cannot bear to hear a helpful or compelling idea coming from someone else. Or the boring patient may be playing possum – just as there are beasts in the jungle that survive by playing dead, some people, when frightened, simply shut down. It’s also true that psychoanalyst and patient will sometimes unconsciously collude to desiccate the atmosphere between them because they fear things becoming too emotionally disturbed, or too exciting.

Buddhist thought has been helpful for me with this because the Buddha’s first noble truth—that life is tinged with a sense of pervasive unsatisfactoriness (or suffering)—takes it as a given that there is always some way that we feel unseen, unknown, or unrecognized.

Psychoanalysis has explored many of the most obvious parental failings that contribute to such feelings but, in trying to find the source, or the cause, of personal uncertainty, it has encouraged people to overly blame their families of origin rather than taking on the responsibility of reaching out to establish whatever kinds of connections are actually possible in life.

I have such a hard time relaxing,” she says. “With men especially, and if I’m attracted to them it’s worse.” There is a longing in April to be known, to be reached, and to be seen, but she is frightened of it at the same time and cannot help but throw up obstacles seemingly in spite of herself. She might spill something in such a situation, for instance. When immersed in her work, April is the opposite. She can be funny, irreverent, spontaneous, innovative, and free. We talk about the paradox. When she loses herself, she is being herself.