Waiting for sense to break through: Lunchtime Talk with Dr Nicola Redhouse, University of Melbourne, Australia
The power of ‘generative uncertainty’ in a polarised world
Wednesday 18 November 2026, 12pm — 1.30pm CEST (10pm — 11.30pm AEST)
Location Online | NOTE EARLIER TIME for this Lunchtime Talk
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.