Uncertainties, mysteries, doubts: a consideration of negative capability in psychodynamic counselling with young people

Abstract

This paper addresses the notion of Negative Capability, a phrase coined by the poet John Keats and picked up by the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion. It explores what each man meant by this phrase, where the concept fits within contemporary psychoanalysis, how it relates to psychodynamic practice, and why it is, I believe, crucial to counselling adolescents. Bion’s reference is brief but the quality he identified—the ability to tolerate therapeutic experiences of uncertainty—has been widely endorsed by clinicians, taken up by the British School of Psychoanalysis in particular. I discuss the ways in which I have attempted and struggled to exercise Negative Capability in my practice, with a focus on the challenges and implications of this approach for my young clients; the paper weaves together the two psychoanalytic perceptions of Negative Capability and adolescence. Keats’s concept is significant to Bion’s metapsychology, as many have noted, linked to his theories of alpha function and the growth of thought, the abandonment of memory and desire, ultimate truth and transformation, and container/contained. With recourse to this last idea, I look at how I tolerated radical uncertainty through the vicissitudes of my own adolescence. I explore Fink’s claim that, contrary to what is perhaps commonly believed of psychotherapy, achieving conscious understanding of the unconscious causes of a symptom is not the primary aim of psychoanalysis or counselling, let alone what effects change or is in every case possible. I support Coltart’s emphasis on Bion’s belief that cultivating faith—in the process of therapy, one’s own therapeutic capacity, the client’s capacity to change, the very possibility of psychic transformation—is key to sustaining the difficult, disquieting, and sometimes almost intolerable therapeutic experience of Negative Capability, a quality I have come to consider critical to my work with young people.