When I taught short fiction writing, I used to quote writer Meg Wolitzer on the pleasures of the form. “You will find yourself in a place you didn’t know about before. A place where you didn’t expect to be.” The trick, I’d tell my students, is to make the reader curious. That was a decade ago, and curiosity seems to have fallen from fashion since.

AI encourages quick, unreliable answers, rather than deep dives and nuance. (Though at the same time, a White House culture of lies – such as Donald Trump’s recent claim that regime change has occurred in Iran – requires a deeper level of fact-checking.) AI also encourages surface-level, short-form entertainments, in a world where 36% of 18–24-year-olds get their news from TikTok.

This week, the world seems especially uncertain. New wars in Iran and Lebanon have joined those in Ukraine and Gaza – where there is currently a ceasefire. In Australia last month, the primary vote of far-right populist party One Nation was higher than the Coalition’s for the first time. Trump is fighting with the Pope. The one bright spot is autocrat Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary. And, of course, it’s all unfolding alongside accelerating climate catastrophe.

It’s not surprising that, under these conditions, we find ourselves craving certainty. But something like its opposite, curiosity, might be what we really need. It might open things up a little – allow us to care about what another feels or how they suffer, or what we might laugh about together.

My worldview has been heavily shaped by the work of 20th-century psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion and what is called “the psychoanalytic attitude”: a state of widely attentive, unrushed curiosity. I believe Bion’s ideas offer a blueprint for how we might encounter our world – and how we might soften its current fundamentalism.

The psychoanalytic attitude

A sometime contrarian, I have become less interested in the end point of the answer than in documenting what it is to grope around in the dark, asking. To probe what it might feel like outside my own body, or in someone else’s head. “Curiosity is the opposite of fanaticism; it asks, ‘What else might be true?’” writes psychotherapist Mannie Sher.

The very foundations of our capacity to think in a way that meets reality – rather than in a way that collapses into terror or rage or fantasies of annihilation – rests upon being able to bear uncertainty, Bion told us.

He understood that to adopt an attitude of already knowing prevented the possibility of real understanding. His work drew on a capacity that poet John Keats named as central to great thinking – negative capability: when a person is “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Bion’s theory stems from the mother-baby relationship. The mother/caregiver adopts a kind of listening and attention that can bear not knowing what the baby wants. It can contain the baby’s rage or disappointment through language and action that meets the baby’s emotional state – cooing and rocking, for example – until she can understand what is being communicated, and meet the baby’s needs.

The “psychoanalytic attitude” has become the cornerstone of productive work for those who draw on Bion’s thinking. Psychoanalytic psychotherapist Robert Snell describes it as “an emotional orientation … a commitment, founded in respect, to maintaining a radically open-minded stance”.

Confronting messy truths

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