On Bion’s Concepts of Negative Capability and Faith

Abstract

Bion left us an important technical principle. We can summarize it in the concepts of negative capacity and faith. They are two sides of the same coin, but they are also widely misunderstood. It is not easy to accept the idea that the analyst must listen to the patient by actively depriving himself of memory, desire, and understanding; not only, but that the analyst has also to focus on the here and now and radically put concrete and historical reality in parentheses. What does it mean for the analyst that the only real world is psychic reality? Why is it so important to favor the “oscillating” work of dream and imagination? The author discusses these concepts, relates them to Freud's concept of evenly suspended or free-floating attention and to the concept of empathy. Finally, he gives some clinical vignettes showing these principles have been reinvented in the post-Bionian field theory.

Keywords:

• Negative capability
• imagination
• free-floating attention
• faith
• Bion
• field theory

Notes

1 In other sections of this paper the word “meaning” refers to the entire process, but the context should help remove the ambiguity. On this, see also J.-J. Koo (2011, pp. 70-71): “‘sense’ here expresses how someone can have a grasp or understanding of things without knowing explicitly how or why, let alone being capable of explaining how or why, she understands them. For this reason ‘sense’ here can be used interchangeably with ‘tacit grasp or awareness,’ as long as the latter is not understood as something like transparent, self-conscious awareness in a quasi-Cartesian way, but rather as a general capacity that functions like the ‘background monitoring’ of things.”

2 Bion writes: “The ‘paper’ (of course I didn’t read it) went off all right. . . a number of people seemed to feel that this time a lot more people grasped the general idea. It might have turned out anyhow—including a boycott” (Abel-Hirsch 2019, p. 373).

3 The Italian expression plays on the double meaning of the word ‘campo’: field and signal.

4 The concept of field is also very different from that of enactment, that is to say, a phenomenon defined as restricted and meant to be dissolved. On this, cfr. the PEP Consolidated Psychoanalytic Glossary (2016): “Enactment is a co-constructed verbal and/or behavioral experience during a psychoanalytic treatment in which a patient's expression of a transference fantasy evokes a countertransference “action” in the analyst. . . . . they are resistances.”

5 TLC acronym usually stands for Tender Loving Care, but I have also found Touch Love Connection and Touch Love Cooking, Top Level Care, The Learning Company, Teaching Learning Creativity, The Laughing Classroom, and many interesting others.