The power of negative capability to reduce anxiety

A primary source of anxiety and anguish is the urgent need to know that is often coupled with insistence on possessing facts, answers and explanations in a world that is complex and full of doubt. Seeking control can create more anxiety in an attempt to alleviate the original discomfort of uncertainty. A feature of perfectionism is an overwhelming fear of making mistakes and the accompanying pressure to get everything right necessitates the impossibility of knowing it all, which leaves no space for discovery or learning.

Negative capability is the capacity to embrace uncertainty and is integral to development and wellbeing. It involves living with mystery, making peace with ambiguity and bearing or perhaps even relishing being lost. It involves tolerating space and allowing there to be an opening that brings with it the potential for something new to emerge.

Within a therapeutic process, it is the therapist’s capacity for negative capability that holds the patient’s uncertainty and creates a containing space for insight to occur. The patient’s capacity for negative capability grows from being lost again and again with the therapist in a process of discovering new directions, solutions to problems and a more fulfilling path in life.

November 2023