Thinking

Following on from the last post, some thoughts about non-thinking or anti-thinking. The danger is to ascribe this, non-thinking, to Trump alone. In line with this blog, we are trying to understand how what seems like a regressive state of being is actually a group phenomenon. Hans Thorner, one of the early commentators on the work of the psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion, wrote:

"...side by side with the desire for knowledge, there is the resistance to knowledge. Getting to know inevitably brings the individual into contact with objects that arouse displeasure. Hence tolerance to pain and displeasure is a precondition for the ability to think."

So the problem here in group terms is to define what are the objects that provoke to the extent that there is a retreat from knowledge.