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‘Negative Capability’, ‘Dispersal’ and the Containment of Emotion
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What is it that enables someone to contain – and to work with – the emotions that inevitably arise in organizational contexts? To explore this question, I shall look at two related ideas. The first is the containing frame of mind, for which Bion used Keats’ term, ‘Negative Capability’. Negative Capability indicates the capacity to contain emotion for the sake of the work and, as a result, to use emotion as information for understanding the work. The second is Needleman’s description of the opposite: ‘dispersal’. Insufficient Negative Capability, leads to dispersal into ‘explanations, emotional reactions or physical action’. Thus, people use a wide variety of forms of dispersal to shut out the new idea or emotion, or ‘to closure off’, as Bion says, ‘what they do not want to see or hear’. Families, groups, teams and organizations tend to have a predisposition for one or other form of dispersal which, as a result, comes to define key characteristics of their cultures. Basic assumptions, for example, and the notion of social systems as a defence against anxiety may both be understood as examples of the way in which dispersal emerges and becomes built into systems. Both are defensive responses to anxieties that are inherent either in the work itself –or indeed in any meeting between humans – and therefore in the very processes of organizing.
The roles of, amongst others, therapist and organizational consultant provide an ‘external’ Negative Capacity by means of which others can come to know their own particular modes of ‘dispersal’.
Theme: A necessary capacity for attention
Effective work in the field addressed by ISPSO demands of us a particular kind of attention. This state of mind depends on our ‘Negative Capability’, that is, on our capacity for thinking and feeling, for learning and containment, for abstention and indifference. Without the quality of attention made possible by this ‘capability’, any amount of insight ‘from a psychoanalytic perspective’ is in danger of remaining irritatingly indigestible or aridly intellectual.
Psychoanalysis – as a philosophy of human relatedness, a psychological theory of development and learning, and a methodology for intervention – is as important in helping us to understand and develop this capacity as it is in helping us to name the ‘unconscious dynamics’ of individuals and of the groups and the organizations with which – and in which – we work.
The aim of the paper
The overall intention of this paper is to explore the nature of this ‘capability’, that is, of the particular capacities which the containment of emotion in organizational work demands, especially when working from ‘a psychoanalytic perspective’.
In this paper, I therefore try to do two things:
‘Negative Capability’
For one of his descriptions of the disposition or state of mind demanded of the psychoanalyst, Wilfred Bion borrowed Keats’ evocative phrase ‘Negative Capability’. Keats used the term to characterise the key attribute of the great poet, ‘the Man of Achievement especially in Literature’. In this state, ‘man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason’ (Keats, 1970, p.43; see, for example, Bion, 1978: 8-9; 1984: 124-5; 1990: 45-6; 1991: 207.)
In recent years, this notion of Negative Capability has been increasingly invoked in discussions of psychoanalytic approaches to consultancy and management. It tends, however, to be presented as if it were unproblematic, or at least self-explanatory, despite the fact that the letter in which Keats introduced the idea has been described as ‘one of the most puzzling of all his letters’ (Bate, 1964: 236-7). Keats was, after all, only twenty-two years old when, in a phase of intense exploration and speculation, he coined the phrase in a sequence of attempts to describe the ‘prime essential’ of a poet (Muir, 1958: 107). These included ‘optimistic naturalism’, ‘empirical humanism’, ‘scepticism’, ‘pessimism’, ‘Wordsworthian humanitarianism’, and, most significantly for this discussion, ‘humility and the capability of submission’ and ‘disinterestedness’ (Bate, 1964, chapter x; Caldwell, 1972: 5). Negative Capability was, therefore, the final – though also itself provisional – ‘dovetailing’ of concepts in Keats’ emerging view of the nature of the poetic imagination.
Negative Capability indicates the capacity to live with ambiguity and paradox, to hold or contain – not just react to – the pressure to act from one’s own ego impulses or act out, to identify with the moods and modes of suffering of the other, in order ‘to be a voice, a vision; to pass on a message, translating it, flawlessly, into another, more easily apprehended tongue.’ (Symons, 1901: 1627.)
By ‘negative capability’ Keats meant the lack of personal identity, of preconceived certainty, which he believed to mark all great poets. It was necessary, Keats believed, for the poet to be, above all, open to impressions, sensations or whatever, which means that the ‘camelion’ poet is forever changing his/her ideas. (Scott, 1969: xv.)
Keats may have been influenced in his idea of Negative Capability by Coleridge’s notion of ‘negative faith’, ‘which simply permits the images presented to work by their own force, without either denial or affirmation of their real existence by the judgement’ (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, Ch. 12; see Bridgwater, 1999: xv; Ryan, 1976: 144-148).
If one can conceive of poet and psychoanalyst as researchers of the human soul (Grk. = psyche; see Bettelheim, 1983: 70-78), then Negative Capability might be thought of as the researcher’s most finely-tuned instrument: ‘what is deepest in the human mystery gives way only before a Negative Capability – which Keats, it would appear, did not conceive to be merely an abdication of intellectual enterprise’ (Scott, 1969: xii-xiii). Rather like the ‘capacity for toleration of frustration’, which Bion described (see Bion, 1962, for example p. 37) and to which it may indeed be related, the inborn propensity for Negative Capability – a ‘native virtue of [the] mind’ (Caldwell, 1972: 7) – is likely to vary from person to person. Although it may, therefore, to some extent come naturally to us, Negative Capability must also be learned: ‘This is a difficult intellectual stance to maintain even in the best of circumstances. To an active, seeking mind, the existence of mysteries poses a challenge. When those mysteries begin to touch a man directly, when they become, as Keats would call them a “burden,” the mind grows increasingly less capable of ignoring them.’ (Ryan, 1976: 157.)
Negative Capability: Key to a ‘family’ of roles? There is an obvious ‘family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein, 1963) between the disinterestedness in Keats’ image of the poet and the radical openness of the analyst – and, perhaps, the ‘psychoanalytically informed’ consultant. Hence Bion’s use of the concept to define the analyst’s state of mind which he also called ‘patience’: ‘Patience should be retained without “irritable reaching after fact and reason” until a pattern evolves’ (Bion, 1984: 124).
Thus, Keats’ poet is ‘related’ to the therapist, and indeed to many other ‘family members’: mother, teacher, priest, consultant, manager – anyone, perhaps, whose role involves responsibility for others. What links them is this disposition of indifference, which Pines (1987: xxiv-xxv) has called ‘aeolian’ after the aeolian harp: ‘to show how the therapist’s mind can be stirred by the communication of the patient, and how, unselfconsciously, the therapist finds himself responding in depth to the patient’s hidden meanings.’ In a very similar way, Symons (1901) has written of Keats that ‘His own personality seemed to him to matter hardly more than the strings of the lyre; without which, indeed, there would be no music audible, but which changed no single note of the music already existing in an expectant silence.’ (Symons, 1901: 1626.)1
But why ‘negative’?
In everyday language the notion of being ‘capable’ is so positive that to call a capability ‘negative’ jars incongruously as, apparently, a complete contradiction. It is as though one were to express +/-, not as + or -, but as + and -. Hence the striking impact of the phrase: it clearly means something and has a seductive and suggestive ring to it, but seems, at the same time, to cancel itself out.
However, on closer inspection, the basic image turns out to be entirely consistent. The root meaning of ‘capable’, like ‘capacity’ and ‘capacious’ – though not ‘ability’ and ‘able’ – is ‘containing’ or ‘spacious’, derived from the Latin word capax, ‘able to hold much’ (French, 1999), and the volume of any container is, of course, a measure of its internal ‘negative’ space.2 As the Tao Te Ching says of the hollow space inside a cup or of the ‘empty spaces’ in a house or room (the doors and windows): ‘without their nothingness they would be nothing’ (Chapter 11; trans. Kwok, Palmer and Ramsay, 1993).
In analytic terms, the ‘cameleon’ work of the analyst-poet involves attention to the ‘negative spaces’ of the patient’s communication. These are brought into view by the physical and temporal space of the setting itself, but also – and, of course, crucially – by the analyst’s own ‘negative space’, that is, his or her availability to the dynamics of transference and countertransference. Bion’s typically uncompromising description of the analyst’s negative space – of the nothingness without which he or she would be nothing – is that ‘the analyst has to become infinite’ (Bion, 1984: 46; his italics). His underlying idea that not-knowing is the necessary state of mind for learning, is extremely close to Keats: ‘The intense pleasure of not knowing, or in the more famous expression he coined, of negative capability, was the perfect state for creation, since it left the imagination completely free to seize Beauty as Truth.’ (Gittings, 1968: 175.)
What links these two thinkers most intimately is their shared emphasis on the search for Truth. For Keats, truth was accessed through the apprehension of Beauty: ‘“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,” – that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ (Ode on a Grecian Urn; see also Raine, 1966); for Bion, through the experience of ‘O’, of emotional reality in the present. (See French and Simpson, 1999).
Thus, Negative Capability describes the capacity to experience emotion, one’s own and others’, but also to contain it for the sake of the work and, by doing so, to learn from and to use emotion to inform our understanding of the work. The ‘negativeness’ of this capability does not indicate negativity, deficiency or insignificance. Instead, it is a measure of the human capacity to contain emotion, the ability to hold enough to be able to hold something for another as well as for oneself (French, 1999: 1218).
‘Soul’
In Lost Christianity, Needleman (1990) describes a human capacity very similar to Negative Capability. In an unintended but potentially fruitful link to Freud (see Bettelheim, 1983: 70-78), Needleman uses the term ‘soul’ to capture the ultimately indefinable nature of the human capacity for containment and growth.
‘Soul’ for Needleman and ‘Negative Capability’ for Keats are developmental categories – but without the linear connotations of ‘stage’ or ‘phase’, nor the overtones of static finality that can attach to Klein’s ‘positions’, nor the restricted and pre-defined nature of the notion of ‘competencies’ and skills (French, 1999:1220-1222).
In Needleman’s terms – and indeed in many philosophical and religious traditions – ‘soul’ does not exist as a fixed quantity with predetermined characteristics. Instead, ‘Every soul is, and becomes, that which she contemplates.’ (Plotinus in Hadot, 1993: 22.) Soul is a quality of mind and being which must be brought into existence or learned:
‘The Question’ emerges in the encounter with the emotional impact of the moment. To meet ‘the Question’ is to stumble upon or be faced with the stark reality of one’s naked vulnerability at the edge between the known and the unknown or not-yet known of one’s experience (French and Simpson, 1999). It is precisely this encounter which enables the creation or development of soul or Negative Capability. However, the emotional impact of any such encounter with truth-in-the-moment, especially for members of a society as fully committed to instant gratification as ours, generates an almost unbearable pressure to avoid the experience rather than to stay with it.
Needleman’s term for the patterns of avoidance that we use to keep out the fearful confusion of this encounter is ‘dispersal’: ‘the first dispersal of the soul’ (1990, p.167).
‘Dispersal’
When we are faced by ‘the Question’ – that is, by the emotional impact of the moment, the ‘uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’ that life inevitably and constantly throws at us – only two outcomes are possible. If we have, or have developed, sufficient Negative Capability, we may be able to stay with the moment and, by doing so, discover a new possibility, however slight. In achieving this, we may also increase our Negative Capability and enlarge the capacity of our ‘soul’, that is, the capacity to contain the uncertainty of not-knowing. The only alternative is: to ‘disperse’.
Needleman specifies three forms which dispersal can take, three more or less automatic or habitual impulses; these are: explanations, emotional reactions or physical action (ibid.).
These defensive-reactive impulses are likely to be familiar to all of us, whether in our own personal responses or in the behaviour of those we meet in the course of our working and private lives. Necessary activities and genuine emotional reactions are ‘subverted’ by dispersal when they leave difficult or unwelcome feelings, issues or relationships unrecognised and therefore unaddressed. Dispersal only avoids the issue for the moment.
One family I worked with, for example, had a well-developed culture of dispersal, based on a combination of explanations and action. For example, a moving television documentary might indeed cause ‘the Question’ to appear, bringing everyone to the edge of a painful new awareness of the reality of human relatedness. However, it would be followed immediately by a dispersal of the feeling, not into tears or anger, but into explanations that thoroughly diluted the Question’s impact: a series of comments on the beauty of the photography, for instance, or on the effective use of Fauré’s Requiem in the soundtrack. At this point, the content and shock of the film now thoroughly ‘lost’, they would shift attention to the wonders of the music itself – “And do you remember that wonderful performance in St Mary’s Cathedral?” Members of this family also exhibited high levels of activity and achievement in the external world, some of which clearly represented a dispersal into physical action. However, their successes were counterbalanced by the appearance of alcoholism, drug addiction and divorce in the wider family.
We might think of individuals, families, groups and organizations as having a natural affinity (‘valency’) or learned tendency for one or other of the three forms of dispersal put forward by Needleman: either for explanations or for emotional reactions or for physical action.
Examples of ‘dispersal’
Dispersal into activity
Shopping, (‘comfort’) eating, dieting, buying a dog when the children leave, decorating the house, organizational re-engineering, mergers and partnerships, sacking employees (at any level), building a shopping mall, warfare, holding a[nother] meeting, moving or expanding offices, investing in a new computer system, hiring a consultant: any of these may be a demonstration of dispersal into activity.
Dispersal into emotional reactions
The scenes surrounding the death and funeral of Princess Diana in 1997 might stand as emblematic of the dispersal into emotionality (combined, for many, with physical activity).
This mode of dispersal is complicated today by dominant understandings of emotion: that emotions are primarily, or even exclusively, personal in nature, rather than contextual or systemic (Armstrong, 1998); that ‘authenticity’ (Taylor, 1991) depends on the development – and expression – of these ‘personal’ emotional states; and that thought and feeling are separate – in contrast to Bion’s fundamental insight that ‘all human thought and endeavour, whatever the field, originates in the transformation of emotional experience’ (Armstrong, 1992: 266).
Dispersal into explanations
Of their nature, explanations and rationalisations are, of course, less visible than actions or emotionality. They are, however, no less widespread as a form of dispersal: strategic planning is often a disguised dispersal into explanation or post hoc rationalisation; reporting and review systems can also be expressions of the dispersal into explanation, as can assessments, consultants’ reports, new procedures, meetings and the apportioning of blame and praise.
Bion appears to have been constantly aware of the dangers of ‘dispersal into explanations’ as a major hazard for psychoanalysts (as it may also be for any work based on talk and on relationship, including organizational consultancy and research). Again and again, and often in formulations that are uncompromising and extreme, Bion warns against the danger of using what we know to explain (away) what we do not know but might come to know, if we did not ‘fill the empty space’ with such explanations (Bion, 1991: 578):
(For further examples from Bion’s writing, see the Appendix, below.)
Dispersal: Linking Keats, Needleman and Bion
Keats’ description of Negative Capability also highlights dispersal, and in terms that match Needleman’s very closely. Broadly, Keats’ equivalent of ‘dispersal of the soul’ is the ‘irritable reaching after fact and reason’. More specifically, Needleman’s ‘explanations’ are Keats’ ‘fact and reason’, while Needleman’s ‘emotional reactions’ are mirrored in Keats’ ‘irritability’.
In a sense, the whole thrust of psychoanalysis is also an attempt to understand and describe the mechanisms of dispersal and to find ways both to reduce the compulsion to disperse (or ‘displace’) and to gather up the passion for life that is lost in the effort to keep psychic pain at bay.
Bion offers vivid and detailed accounts of dispersal at many levels and in different contexts with his fundamental ideas on containment, on alpha and beta functioning, on basic assumption mentality in groups and organizations, and on projection (‘project’: Latin pro+iacere = ‘throw or fling forward’; ‘disperse’: Latin dis+spargere = ‘throw bits in several directions’, ‘scatter’). In one of his talks, Bion himself explicitly linked a form of dispersal (‘closure’) to failed Negative Capability: ‘Keats, in a letter to his brother, describes what he calls “negative capability”. It is clear that he is talking about this same curious business in which most people want to closure off what they don’t want to see or hear’ (1978: 8-9).
Bion’s use of Keats’ notion of Negative Capability is one among a large number of terms in psychoanalysis that attempt to describe a peculiarly human disposition for containment and its therapeutic or developmental importance. Such terms include, for instance: Freud’s ‘evenly suspended attention’; Winnicott’s ‘holding’ and ‘waiting’; Klein’s ‘projective identification’; Bion’s ‘faith’, ‘patience’, ‘reverie’, ‘thinking’ and ‘capacity to contain’.
When dispersal becomes systemic
In individuals and in groups, habits of dispersal can become established with great rapidity: the higher the anxiety levels, the quicker this can happen. In organizational contexts, on the other hand, patterns of dispersal tend to evolve more gradually. In either case, when these patterns become habitual, they tend to pass unnoticed as part of “the way we do things round here” or as the quirks of more or less irritating – or impressive – individuals or working groups: “That’s ‘x’ all over”; “That’s just the way they are over there”; “Typical man/woman/manager/student/teacher”.
Because their development is unplanned and largely unconscious, these patterns can, over time, evolve into the defining characteristics of the culture of an organization. Many of the intractable problems of groups and organizations arise from the fact that cultures of dispersal have become self-perpetuating. When new members join or are appointed they tend to ‘fit’ and therefore reinforce the established pattern of dispersal.
Bion’s ideas on basic assumption mentality and Jaques’ and Menzies Lyth’s notion of social systems as a defence against anxiety may both be understood as examples of the way in which dispersal operates in systems – in groups, teams, departments and organizations. Both are defensive responses to ‘the Question’, that is to anxieties that are inherent either in the work itself – or indeed in any meeting between humans – and, as a result, in the very processes of organizing.
Basic assumptions and dispersal Essentially, a basic assumption group ‘wastes’ energy that might otherwise be used to address the task for which it exists by dispersing it into one or other ‘basic assumption’ – pairing, fight/flight, dependency, merging (‘oneness’) or isolation (‘me-ness’). (See, for example, Bion, 1961; Hopper, 1997; Lawrence, Bain and Gould, 1996; Turquet, 1974.)
Insight, learning and change can arise for a group caught in basic assumption mentality, when it is recognised how much of the group’s energy is leaking uselessly away or being actively diverted from the task. At this point of insight, the group may try to stop the leakage in order to focus rather than disperse their energies. At such moments, there is often a palpable change in the mood or climate of the group: a tangible rise in energy levels and a reduction in tension – or simply a recognition and acceptance of that tension. This is what Bion’s ‘work group’ feels like.
However, cultures of dispersal in groups are every bit as hard to change as habits are for individuals. The moment of insight can just as easily be ‘hijacked’ by the incapacity that led to the dispersal in the first place. Anyone who has worked in a group relations context will have experienced the way the language of basic assumptions can be used – like a game: ‘spot the basic assumption!’ – to disperse the unsettling presence of ‘the Question’. As often as not, when pairing, for example, is occurring and is named, whether by a participant or by a member of staff, it seems to be ‘assumed’ that that is the end of the matter. Why this pair and why now? What do they represent? What is being avoided or dispersed? What would the group do if they dropped their attachment to this pairing? Such questions can all too easily be lost in attempts to find the ‘right’ label: the ‘illusory quality’ of naming (Armstrong, 1992: 263). The original dispersal into the emotion and the activity of pairing is simply shifted onto a dispersal into explanation. In this way, the underlying issue, which might have become available for thought, is instead hidden under a further level of disguise. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. It may be for precisely this reason that Bion himself appeared to lose interest in ‘his’ basic assumptions. Throughout his life, he constantly sought to re-express his thinking in each new context, always striving to escape from the potentially deadening effect of definition. For example, in relation to the ‘Grid’, he once said ‘As soon as I got the Grid out of my system I could see how inadequate it is. ... It is for you to decide whether it is any use to you. If it is not, do not waste time on it. The same advice applies to any future Grid that I might formulate. ... [Q: “Is it (the Grid) hard?”] Not for me - only a waste of time because it doesn’t really correspond with the facts I am likely to meet.’ (Bion, 1980: 56.)
In an intriguing insight into this constant pattern in Bion’s way of thinking, David Armstrong has described how basic assumptions were notable only by their absence in the last ‘study group’ which Bion himself ran in the United Kingdom before moving to America.
Social systems and dispersal
As for basic assumptions, so for ‘social systems as a defence against anxiety’; that is, the process whereby patterns of dispersal become built into social systems and structures and into cultures of acting, reacting and relating.
Isabel Menzies Lyth’s (1959) case study of ‘the functioning of social systems as a defence against anxiety’ illustrates clearly how energies that could have been used to attend to patients’ needs were dispersed into devising and sustaining modes of organizing and interacting that were anti-task because they actually worked against patient care. It is as though – when they are systemic in nature or in origin –the defences of individuals and also group basic assumption states generated in the here and now become institutionalised in the social systems that evolve at departmental or organizational levels.
Negative Capability and role
The capacity to contain emotion could be thought of as an intrinsic function of every role. Indeed, as soon as a role is seen to exist – and even before a person is appointed to fill it – it provides an ‘object’ for projections, that is a negative, ‘empty’ space into which emotions can be dispersed. (Cf. Lacan’s [1979] ‘sujet supposé savoir’.) Thus officially designated and sanctioned roles serve as a public vehicle for unconscious dynamics, whereas ‘unofficial’ roles – from leader to scapegoat, from bully to victim – emerge as a direct expression of a group’s unconscious, which will seek out whatever ‘vehicle’ it requires, whether an individual, a group, a race or a nation.
To the extent that we all have to live with uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, we could all be said to depend on our Negative Capability for survival. As Hinshelwood (1991: 248) writes in his entry on containment, ‘The analyst is certainly one container, and mother is another, but the theory does not stop there. As is clear, anyone with a maternal aspect to their character who can listen could function in this way.’ However, situations that make significant demands on people to contain their own and others’ emotions as part of their organizational roles demand significantly deeper levels of this capability. Whilst for some roles Negative Capability may be of secondary importance or relatively hidden, for the ‘family’ of roles under consideration here (see above) its significance is central.
The role of consultant could be understood as depending on the ability to find in oneself a quality of Negative Capability adequate to the client’s modes or habits of dispersal. The aim of organizational consultancy is to provide individuals, groups or the whole organization with an external Negative Capability – well enough and for long enough – to enable them to develop, in themselves and in their structures and procedures, sufficient capacity to drop their habitual patterns of dispersal. This means developing in individuals and groups adequate levels of Negative Capability, that is, a particular kind of ‘organizational capacity’ or ‘organizational soul’.
All organizational consultancy, even of the most technical kinds, aims to help an organization expand its capacities in some way. The particular contribution of psycho-dynamically informed consultancy may be to expanding the Negative Capability within an organization. Hence its particular relevance during periods of change, when ‘uncertainties, mysteries and doubts’ can seem overwhelming.
‘Negative’ and ‘Positive’ Capabilities
A colleague of mine was once unexpectedly promoted to a senior management position. Within less than a week, much had changed: his facial expression was tense, he was generally in a rush, sometimes cancelling his breaks during the day, and could be seen almost running in the corridor on his way to lunch.
What lay at the root of the changes?
Clearly he had been pushed to the edge of his capacities. One hypothesis would be that he was having difficulty ‘coping’ with the emotional impact of the demands made of him; another that he simply did not have the competence to manage the new tasks that faced him. In other words, either his Negative Capability was not adequate for the task of containment that the job demanded, or his ‘Positive Capability’ was lacking. Gillian Rose points out that Keats did not explore ‘positive capability’, which she defines as: ‘the enlarging of inhibited reason in the domain of praxis, of practical reason, Aristotle’s phronesis [practical intelligence], the educating of wisdom that knows when to pass unnoticed and when to act.’ (Rose, 1999: 32.)
Only considerable analysis could determine the extent to which my colleague’s ‘lack of coping’ stemmed from a failure of ‘Positive’ or ‘Negative’ Capability, and then whether this failure was his alone or might be found more generally located in the wider organization. If it were a problem of Positive Capability, attention might need to be given, for example, to the skills and competences associated with a whole gamut of managerial activities from strategic planning and delegation to running meetings and developing IT and administrative support systems and abilities. There was, however, evidence that Negative Capability was the issue. He was certainly experiencing ‘doubts and uncertainties’ and much of the new role was still a ‘mystery’ to him. Although he did not appear to be ‘reaching after fact and reason’, he was certainly irritable and, in terms of Needleman’s framework, he was definitely ‘dispersing’ energy into activity and emotionality.
One might ask much the same questions of any organizational case material. When people demonstrate activity, emotion or explanation, are they dispersing or engaging? To what extent are observed behaviours unconscious attempts to avoid ‘the Question’, to ‘closure off what they don’t want to see or hear’? If they are having difficulty managing tasks and themselves in their roles, does the problem lie in the realm of Negative or of Positive Capability? Are such problems individual or systemic in origin?
Conclusion: Developing Negative Capability in context
The proposition in this paper is that to understand and work effectively with emotions in organizations we have to understand, on the one hand, the impulse to disperse and, on the other, the containing potential of Negative Capability. This potential exists at the levels of the individual, of the group and of the organization, in its structures, roles, culture and procedures.
However, for the application of these ideas, generalities must be grounded in specifics: ‘He who would do good to another must do it in Minute Particulars:/ General Good is the plea of the scoundrel, hypocrite & flatterer/ ... he who would see a Vision, a perfect Whole,/ Must see it in its Minute Particulars, Organized, ...’ (Blake, Jerusalem, in Keynes, 1966: 687, 738.)
In relation to ‘Negative Capability, dispersal and the containment of emotion’, the ‘particular’ question is: For any specific role – manager, leader or organizational consultant, teacher3 or student, social worker, health visitor or surgeon – what are the patterns or forms of dispersal the role holder is likely to encounter in their clients and in themselves? And, as a result, what kind and what level of Negative Capability does each role demand?
It is here that psychoanalysis may have a particular contribution to make. Most training emphasizes the positive capabilities that a role demands; in teaching, for instance, this includes such elements as subject knowledge, teaching methodologies, classroom management and learning theory. A psychoanalytic training, however, can be viewed as combining its equivalent ‘positive’ elements with activities – notably a training analysis – specifically designed to develop the trainee’s Negative Capability. Despite the all-too-human shortcomings of such training (Kernberg, 1996), the central intention is to develop in the trainee precisely the Negative Capability on which creative work with the experiences of transference and countertransference depend.
Thus, a crucial aspect of the work required to translate from concept to reality the idea of dispersal and its containing counterbalance, Negative Capability, is to contextualize the questions. What negative and positive capacities does this role in this organizational context demand? What kind of containing role does this institution – prison, business, school, hospital, children’s home, parliament – perform on behalf of this community?
In using the language of dispersal and Negative Capability to address such questions, it is worth reminding ourselves that the phrase was coined by Keats, a poet. What training is required to produce the Negative Capability that Keats held to be the unique quality of a poet of genius, ‘& which Shakespeare posessed so enormously’ (Keats, 1970: 43)? Is Negative Capability, as Kathleen Raine (1986: 322) suggests, a ‘gift’ (‘not of observation but of empathy’) or is it, to use Aristotle’s term, a hexis, that is, a characteristic we all possess by dint of being human, but which we also choose to develop or to neglect?
How can one develop from potentiality to reality the in-born human disposition for Negative Capability?
The question goes to the very heart of what it means to be ‘psychoanalytically informed’.
In The Question of Lay Analysis, Freud made it clear that, in his opinion, it was not possible to understand psychoanalysis without experiencing it: ‘They must learn to understand analysis in the only way it is possible – by themselves undergoing an analysis’ (Freud, 1926: 248). In the first sentence of Attention and Interpretation, Bion expresses a similar sentiment: ‘I doubt if anyone but a practising psycho-analyst can understand this book although I have done my best to make it simple.’ By way of explanation, he goes on, in an echo of T.S. Eliot, to say that ‘Any psycho-analyst who is practising can grasp my meaning because he, unlike those who only read or hear about psycho-analysis, has the opportunity to experience for himself what I in this book can only represent by words and verbal formulations designed for a different task.’ (Bion, 1984: 1; his italics.)
Such statements place the writers, more or less consciously, within a tradition of learning from experience at least as old as the Greeks. It is a ‘lost’ tradition, however, which was based on the fundamental belief that ‘doctrines or ideas cannot ultimately be separated from the practical method that guides the individual’s actual experience’ (Needleman, 1998: 12). For Hadot, this is the ancient tradition in which philosophy is only true philosophy when it becomes ‘a way of life’ (Hadot, 1995, 1998). As the Symingtons write about Bion – immediately echoing the ancient view which Hadot describes so vividly: ‘Bion’s recommendation that the analyst strive after Negative Capability is not an immediate mental discipline to be engaged in just prior to the session, but rather a way of life.’ (Symington and Symington, 1996: 169.) Notes
[1] An aeolian harp stands in the open or hangs in a tree. It is set up and tuned in such a way that its strings vibrate in the wind, even in the most gentle breeze, giving voice, as it were, to a music that is there but unheard – like an ‘unthought known’ (Bollas, 1987). Cox and Theilgaard (1987) developed Pines’ use of the term ‘aeolian’ to encapsulate their practice of ‘dynamic psychotherapy in which the therapist’s augmented access to the patient’s inner world is catalysed by poetic association and poetic induction’ (p. 55).
Appendix
The following quotations are included as an impressionistic way of capturing Bion’s understanding of Negative Capability, in relation to the role of psychoanalyst. (Extreme though many of Bion’s statements on the state of mind required of the analyst may appear to be – such as working without memory, desire, even the desire for ‘cure’ or understanding – they did have a distinguished precursor in the field: ‘I cannot advise my colleagues too urgently to model themselves during psycho-analytic treatment on the surgeon, who puts aside all his feelings, even his human sympathy, and concentrates his mental forces on the single aim of performing the operation as skilfully as possible. Under present-day conditions the feeling that is most dangerous to a psycho-analyst is the therapeutic ambition to achieve by this novel and much disputed method something that will produce a convincing effect upon other people.’ [Freud, 1912: 115.])
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