Building "Negative Capability" to Unlock Hidden Potential

The poet John Keats, writing to his brothers about the power of art, truth, and beauty,¹ experienced whilst walking with friends an epiphany regarding William Shakespeare's genius:

John Keats.

Source: William Hilton/Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

"[S]everal things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half knowledge."

Negative Capability

On first glance, the term “negative capability” seems self-contradictory. “Don’t just do something, stand there” (a phrase we use in crisis management) seems questionable at best. However counterintuitive, as much as quick thinking and action can save the day, sometimes the wisest thing to do is allow experience to run its course, unperturbed by "irritable reaching after fact and reason."

As Reggie Watts, musician, comedian, and entertainer, states in his trippy TED talk "Reggie Watts disorients you in the most entertaining way":

... it is within our self-interest to understand the topography of our lives unto ourselves. The future states that there is no time other than the collapsation of that sensation of the mirror of the memories in which we are living. Common knowledge but important nonetheless.

It requires tremendous restraint to stay with what appears to be high-minded gobbledygook, layers of raw poetic language which refreshingly bend rationality. (The talk is also laugh-out-loud funny.)

Negative Capability and the "Fundamental Rule" of Psychoanalysis

The Fundamental Rule of psychoanalysis, presented by Sigmund Freud in Recommendations to Physicians Practising Psycho-Analysis, is a formal discipline taking years to learn:

"[The analyst or therapist] should withhold all conscious influences from his capacity to attend, and give himself over completely to his 'unconscious memory.’ Or, to put it purely in terms of technique: ‘He should simply listen, and not bother about whether he is keeping anything in mind.’ To put it in a formula: he must turn his own unconscious like a receptive organ towards the transmitting unconscious of the patient."

Freud called it “evenly-suspended attention,” in many ways resembling ancient meditative practices. The complementary patient's task is equally demanding:

"It will be seen that the rule of giving equal notice to everything is the necessary counterpart to the demand made on the patient that he should communicate everything that occurs to him without criticism or selection."²

This is called “free association,” at the core of psychoanalysis.³

Together, free association and evenly-suspended attention form a powerful change catalyst, though the unknown potentials inherent may evoke unformulated distress.

The Many Benefits of Negative Capability

1. Practicing free association in dialogue with another person builds the capacity for thinking, which ideally develops through a healthy parent-child relationship and interactions with others. Through exposure to one’s own inner processes heard out loud and spoken to another human being, we learn a lot about how our own mind works.

The social dimension is critical, as it actives relational parts of the brain which would not be online otherwise, for example in contrast with automatic writing, in which one writes whatever comes out without editing.

2. Negative capability builds reflective function, critical for optimal personal development. Reflective function, also called mentalization, allows us to accurately understand and interpret our own and others’ mental experience. Opening up space for many perspectives, experience becomes mutual, both/and and either/or, and not simply either/or. Fights become conversations, conflicts become constructive, you and me become us.

3. Negative capability helps build "inhibitory control," a mental function crucial for performance in many domains. Good executive function requires the ability to tell ourselves "no," also known as inhibitory control. Negative capability builds this inhibitory muscle, allowing the mind to enter into a state ripe with possibility. Negative capability allows us to simulate reality, a core evolutionary brain function, more fully. By opening up as many future paths to the imagination as we can conceive, prospective decision-making is enabled, a superior alternative to learning the hard way. Healthy self-doubt, a critical aspect of negative capability, helps us leapfrog problem areas.

Freudian Psychology Essential Reads

The Birth of Psychoanalysis, and the Erasure of a Life

Failed Resolutions and Broken Promises

4. Negative capability, especially within a therapeutic or personal development context, builds the capacity to recognize, appreciate and adaptively experience the full range of emotions—often called "emotion regulation," a cornerstone of self-regulation. Negative capability makes room for subtle experiences which, though important, would not come to a mind pressured, distracted, or otherwise unavailable⁴. Overcoming alexithymia, difficulty recognizing and discussing emotions with an excessive external focus, helps with personality function and communication. What is less often discussed is that very positive experiences, re-discovery of important parts of oneself, experiences of creativity, joy, desire, compassion, and connection.

5. We are less constrained by reason and logic. Logic is wonderful, and reason is a powerful tool. Yet there are times in life when they are insufficient, aside from the sometimes problematic effect they have on how we view emotions. Sometimes we need to "turn off the targeting computer" and get in touch with deeper experiences which logic may flee from in terror. Negative capability decenters "irritable reaching after fact and reason," empowering us to tap into primal forces.

6. Negative capability is the embodiment of curiosity and creativity. Opening up the mind to many possibilities is the basis of curiosity, though of course intense curiosity may be very driven and circumscribed at times. When logic is less of a priority, the pleasure of meandering curiosity allows the mind to go down less familiar paths. Likewise, creativity has been shown to be increased when we pass over the most common, immediate answers. Negative capability allows us to reflect, with evenly-suspended attention, upon whether ideas which come to us are novel or repetitive.

Global Negative Capability

Over time, you get something like your own “operator’s manual,” which highlights the subject nature of one’s own individual differences while leaving room for objective understanding of how the mind and brain functions to be incorporated into one’s personal narrative. Being present in the company of another, a listener who cares, is accepting or loving, is a critical piece of development. We don't always get that growing up, and if we haven't developed that inner good relationship, where we listen to ourselves, we may end up "self-silencing", and suffering as a result.

Negative capability may be considered not only an individual trait. Groups of people, cultures, and societies may also cultivate and possess this quality. Usually, we need a problem, an acute danger such as a pandemic, to force us to outside of the box.

If the world could slow down and reflect, exercising greater ensemble negative capability, perhaps we could handle thorny problems like climate change, scarce resource allocation and resource development, disease prevention and management, inequity, and a slew of other evolutionary sticking points more effectively.

Einstein famously asked Freud whether there was a way to free humankind from the threat of war. Freud’s comprehensive response begins with the following passage, resonant with negative capability:

"Conflicts of interest between man and man are resolved, in principle, by recourse to violence. It is the same in the animal kingdom, from which man cannot claim exclusion; nevertheless men are also prone to conflicts of opinion, touching, on occasion, the loftiest peaks of abstract thought, which seem to call for settlement by quite another method. This refinement is, however, a late development."