Waiting for sense to break through: the power of ‘generative uncertainty’ in a polarised world

In psychoanalysis, the space of thinking and talking between analyst and analysand becomes a site for creative collaboration that has at its core the hope of meaning-making. It’s a space founded on an understanding that what we communicate to each other may bear disguise or displacement and that, for meaning-making to happen, both present may have to bear the uncertainty of waiting for sense to break through. 

This model for what we might call ‘generative uncertainty’, developed extensively by Wilfred Bion, sees sense breaking through via an experience of emotional understanding. Dr Nicola Redhouse has used this model with creative writing students and with students of health sciences to enliven their creative practices and to challenge their attitudes to not-knowing.

What might this model of generative uncertainty have to offer an increasingly polarised world in which we often recede to black and white positions, communicate in slogans and generally close ourselves off from the discomfort of listening to the other in a way that might let us feel with them and understand? 

In this lunchtime talk, Dr Nicola Redhouse canvasses the notion of uncertainty and its uses in psychoanalytic thinking, and in the context of our fractured world considers how a practice or attitude of bearing uncertainty in daily life might open us up to its generative potential.

About Dr Redhouse

Dr Nicola Redhouse is an author and academic living in Melbourne, Australia, whose writing and research draws on psychoanalytic thinking and approaches. 

Her book Unlike the Heart: a memoir of brain and mind (UQP) explores the psyche/soma divide in a quest to get to both the centre of her own life story and that of psychoanalysis as a form of treatment. 

She has been published widely on topics spanning the science of dreaming, the Royal Commission into Mental Health in Australia, soundscapes of the Pandemic and gender-oriented voice therapy for publications including The Age, the Australian, The Guardian, The Monthly, The Conversation and Quarterly Essay. Her fiction appears in literary journals Meanjin, Island and The Griffith Review, and twice in Best Australian Stories 

Her research offers ways for creative writers to draw on generative uncertainty using psychoanalytic modes of noticing to enliven their work, and she is currently conducting a pilot study using this technique with University of Melbourne students of Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences as a potential intervention to their experiences of uncertainty in their work.

Fun fact

Nicola wrote a review about a disastrous hotel stay that went viral and she still gets fan mail for it. Sadly, she wrote it under the pseudonym ‘Kermit the Frog’, quashing her one real chance for global fame.