Negative capability

Abstract: THOMAS H. OGDEN: Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming. Jason Aronson, Northvale, NJ, 2001, 255 pp., $40.00, ISBN: 0-7657-0312-2. The title of Thomas J. Ogden's latest book refers to the "conversations with oneself that take place at the unconscious-preconscious frontier" of psychoanalysis (p. 11). A proponent of intersubjectivity, Ogden-a Supervising and Training Analyst at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California and a member of the Faculty of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute-is the author of five earlier books, including Reverie and Interpretation: Sensing Something Happen (1997), upon which his present book builds. His aim here is to make "audible" to the analyst, analysand, and general reader the conversations that arise from therapy-conversations affirming psychoanalysis as a form of human relatedness. As he notes at the beginning of his book, "the dreams and reveries being generated by analyst and patient at the frontier of dreaming draw not only on the unconscious experience of analyst and analysand as individuals, but also involve a set of unconscious experiences jointly, but asymmetrically, constructed by the analytic pair" (p. 11). Ogden calls this unconscious intersubjective construction the "analytic third," which he defines as the subject of psychoanalysis-a view that he develops in the rest of the book. Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming will perhaps most interest psychotherapists for its lively discussions of the "intersubjective analytic third." Ogden describes what it feels like to be with a patient, including his own anxiety in the transference-countertransference relationship. He is refreshingly self-critical, as when he admits that There have been times when I have found my voice disappointingly wooden-or cloyingly sweet, or hollowly authoritative, or embarrassingly thin. Voice (my own and the patient's) is always an object of analytic scrutiny, and so even (or perhaps in particular) these disturbing surprises are not unwelcome events, nor are they a source of worry. I am far more concerned by long periods of absence of surprise in my experience of my own voice or the patient's, (p. 76) Ogden focuses on the psychoanalyst's reveries during his waking dreams, and he is interested in describing the analyst as both an unself-conscious subject and the object of self-scrutiny. Citing D.W. Winnicott, whom he believes to be the greatest English-speaking psychoanalyst, Ogden asserts that "we must live with the paradox (without attempting to resolve it) that there is no such thing as an analysand apart from the relationship with the analyst, and no such thing as an analyst apart from the relationship with the analysand" (p. 20). Ogden's fondness for paradoxes-"I will conclude this discussion (which does not aspire to be inclusive or conclusive)" (p. 44)-may strike the reader as liberating or maddening (or perhaps both); rarely does he resolve any of the thorny questions he raises. Indeed, he remains more interested in questions than in answers, and his tolerance for paradox and ambiguity recalls the poet John Keats's idea of Negative Capability, which he expressed in a letter written in 1817: "that is, when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason" (p. 525). Unlike many psychoanalytic thinkers, Ogden offers no overarching theory (apart from the "analytic third"), and the loose structure of his argument, which gives the book a conversational quality befitting its thesis, may be viewed as both a strength and a weakness. Many of the chapters were first published in psychoanalytic journals, and the connections among the chapters are often tenuous. What is not tenuous about Conversations at the Frontier of Dreaming is its recognition of the centrality of language. Ogden knows that language not only expresses thought but creates it: "naming and describing 'me' metaphorically creates both 'I' and 'me' as interdependent aspects of human self-awareness (human subjectivity)" (p. …

Abstract: I left America because I doubted my ability to survive the fury of the color problem here. . . . I wanted to prevent myself from becoming merely a Negro; or even, merely a Negro writer. I wanted to find out in what way the specialness of my experience could be made to connect me with other people instead of dividing me from them. (James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name)Racial recusal is a forlorn hope. In a system where whiteness is the default, racelessness is never a possibility. You cannot opt out. You can only opt in. (Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Man)The opening epigraphs illustrate a tension that must still be felt by many artists as we begin the twenty-first century. James Baldwin writes of his need to get away from the United States in order to keep himself from "becoming merely a Negro; or even, merely a Negro writer." Baldwin needed to escape the omnipresence of his color and what it has meant in this country in order to become a writer who could connect with readers, rather than speaking to them from across a yawning racial chasm. Whether Baldwin found it more necessary to escape other people's constructions of his race, or his own, internalized constructions is a subject for speculation, and one for which we are unlikely to find an answer.If we read Baldwin's haunting lament against the ideals of Pablo Neruda, who calls poetry "a deep inner calling in man," and who confers upon poets a sacred duty to enter the priesthood of letters and "interpret the light" (Hirsch 1999, 225), we see a disheartening gap between Neruda's ideal and the reality of Baldwin's troubled life. Neruda would have poets be the acknowledged legislators of the world; in contrast, Baldwin's career was one of protracted, painful negotiation with his world. Refusal to negotiate in the way Baldwin needed to may explain, in part, writer Anatole Broyard's decision to pass as white. For as Henry Louis Gates, Jr., notes in his essay about Broyard, that author "did not want to write about black love, black passion, black suffering, black joy; he wanted to write about love and passion and suffering and joy. We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be black, but had anyone, in the postwar era, ever seen such a thing?" (1997, 208). Would readers have recognized such an author if they had seen one, or would they, regardless of color, have accused the author of ducking an artist's responsibilities to engage with race and of being a dark imitator of the European masters?Meditating on Broyard's "choice" and Gates's essay about it, critic Susan Gubar writes that Broyard's "racial imposture ... hints that whiteness remains 'the default position' for individuality, whereas blackness continues to be attached to the concept of race, of race type, and thus to race prejudice" (1997,20). One consequence of this "default position" of whiteness is the literary ghetto of which Robert Hay den wrote in 1967, when he suggested that the critical tendency to see established African American authors as spokespeople for their race placed "any Negro author in a kind of literary ghetto where the standards applied to other writers are not likely to be applied to him" (1967, xix-xx). In short, race trumps all else in far too many readers' relationship to the works of writers of color. These readers may see poetry or fiction as imaginative bits of sociology or political theory, the subjects of which are assumed to be determined by their author's color. The canonical greats, it is suggested, wrote and read from a position of universal humanity; however, non-white writers are perceived as special, hence bracketed, in ways such authors as William Shakespeare and William Blake are not.One can make a convincing case that authors as bold and imaginative as Baldwin, Hayden, Rita Dove, and Gwendolyn Brooks have all contended with the backhanded compliment of being read and described as spokespeople for their race, rather than as individual craftspeople whose subjectivity was and is informed, but not determined, by that race. …

Abstract: How leaders and managers respond to not knowing is highly relevant given the complex, ambiguous, and chaotic business environment of the twenty-first century. Drawing on the literature from a variety of disciplines, the paper explores the dominant, unfavorable conceptualization of not knowing. The authors present some potential ethical implications of a negative view of not knowing and suggest how organizations would benefit from identifying any unhelpful aspects of the culture that may encourage unethical, undesirable, and/or hasty actions in situations of not knowing. The paper specifically illustrates how patience, courage, honesty, integrity, and humility are integral to negative capability in the contexts of not knowing. Finally, the paper calls for deeper inquiry into the role of virtue ethics in preparing managers and leaders for not knowing and urges organizations to embrace negative capability in not knowing rather than engaging in damaging delusion.

Abstract: Despite the great amount of information social workers are expected to assimilate from a range of diverse sources, the experience of practice appears to be marked less by clear and precise knowledge and more by uncertainty and change. In this paper I suggest that in responding to uncertainty constructively, the concept of ‘negative capability’, first used by the poet John Keats and developed since, may provide a concise yet rich expression of some of the characteristics of effective practice. After discussing negative capability briefly in its original context, this paper considers its key elements and how these may be applicable to contemporary social work, drawing on insights from psychoanalysis and business and noting links with reflective practice and emotional intelligence. It emphasizes that negative capability's components of open-mindedness, attentiveness to diversity and the suspension of the ego are helpful, both in defining important aspects of effective and person-centred practice and in provi...