The Many Meanings of Silence

"A patient sits silent for 30 seconds, and then for a minute, and the silence could be any number of things- shame, trust, dissociation, fatigue, anger, or something just beginning to surface, or simply that nothing has arrived yet and won't for a while-and reaching too quickly for one reading closes the others, while reaching too slowly lets something pass that may not come back."

"This is the situation negative capability was named for, experiences of deep uncertainty, where trying to solve problems quickly is a failure mode. Keats's Shakespeare's-genius-inspired phrase- the capacity to remain in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without irritable reaching after fact and reason -is often treated as a stance, a kind of contemplative patience, sitting with the not-knowing and declining the urge to resolve it. That's true, and it's also incomplete, because uncertainty turns out not to be one thing, and tolerate ambiguity turns out not to be one discipline."

"The harder and more useful question is: What kind of not-knowing are you actually in?Doubtless, there are also times when asking, What kind of uncertainty is this? is problematic as well, a kind of "meta-uncertainty" to bear in mind."

"There's evidence uncertainty: You don't yet know enough a... Ethical uncertainty needs time. Human-state uncertainty needs presence. The discipline isn't tolerating ambiguity. It's naming which kind of not-knowing you're in before acting."

Negative capability is not a single stance but a family of skills for handling deep uncertainty. Different kinds of uncertainty call for different responses, such as investigating, stepping back, slowing down, or staying present. Evidence uncertainty requires gathering data, ethical uncertainty requires time, and human-state uncertainty requires presence. Silence in interaction can signal many different internal states, and rushing to interpret it can close off other possibilities, while waiting too long can let important signals pass. The key discipline is naming which kind of not-knowing is present before choosing an action, rather than tolerating ambiguity in general.

Read at Psychology Today