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The Romantic poet John Keats, one of the great literary geniuses of the 19th century, gave us the concept of negative capability, the capacity to live in ambiguous and mysterious places and to embrace uncertainty and doubt. He asked us to live the questions; he believed that the most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. He was a thinker, but longed to be among the dreamers of the world. Tragically, he died at the age of 25; his gravestone bears the words, “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”
The British psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, informed by Keats, emphasized that this ambiguous and mysterious place of not knowing is essential to the psychoanalytic session and to life itself.
In this issue, we have a remarkable mix of themes and variations—the inner voices of five psychoanalysts and a grandmother—all grappling with the mystery of unknown places. The six contributors have found a way to bring the undersong that plays in our quietest reflective moments into poetic language.