Neuroscience and Negative Capability

Letter sent to The Guardian 18/04/26

I was pleased to see in Dr Hannah Critchlow's article (How to train your brain to see possibility instead of doom) that neuroscience has discovered the challenges of managing uncertainty, and of poet John Keats's concept of 'negative capability' as an important human capacity when facing 'not knowing'. These ideas are central to psychoanalysis and especially its application to organisations known as systems-psychodynamics. 

Wilfred R Bion (1897 – 1979) first suggested that the ability to remain “in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, as Keats described, was an important state of mind for the psychoanalyst to nurture. In simple terms we might think of it as keeping an open mind and not rushing to premature conclusions. 

This was later applied in the context of providing consultancy to organisations where, for example, a leader's capacity to not know all the answers, to remain in a liminal space between knowing and not knowing, was seen as an important response to the uncertainty, complexity or ambiguity of many business situations. These are key skills for what Ronald Heifetz called 'adaptive change' and 'adaptive leadership'. 

Dr Critchlow rightly highlights that "In a rapidly changing world, the ability to tolerate uncertainty may be one of our most important cognitive skills."  A finding in my own research into how information technologies mediate organisational processes was that, as a response to the binary true/false reality generated by computers, negative capability may become the most important human attribute in a world of automation and jobs lost to AI. 

Anxiety drives us towards certainty and a false sense of knowing. The containment of that anxiety and ability to remain in uncertainty is central to the training of psychotherapists, organisation consultants and leaders at Tavistock Education & Training.