Due to the empirical emphasis in psychological research, the positive – that which can be controlled, tested, and measured – aspects of psychotherapeutic practice are foregrounded. While there is a great deal of dissatisfaction with this emphasis among therapists, there is difficulty in developing a rigorous language that can counter this emphasis and focus on phenomena that are unamenable to measure yet play a constitutive role in the therapeutic encounter. Experienced therapists often articulate notions such as trust, care, empathy, relationality, and generosity to describe the therapeutic process. Such notions are usually demonstrated through case studies and anecdotal retellings but have little conceptual rigour. The difficulty in developing precise positive accounts need not be a theoretical liability (or the reasons for the disavowal of such an inquiry) and can form the basis for a qualitative rather than quantitative examination. There is a need for a philosophical examination – a conceptual illumination – of the notions and qualities involved in the therapeutic setting. This proposal puts forward a case for looking at the phenomena involved in the therapeutic encounter – those strategies and attitudes that form the basis for the unique relation between therapist and patient – through a negative lens i.e. as negative concepts and negative capability. Since both the therapist and user have to discover themselves and each other through revising and loosening the resistance of previously held notions, feelings and attitudes, the discovery of a therapeutic space is often intermingled with negative acts, acts of renouncing, erasure, removal and disappearance. In order to develop such an account in the therapeutic context, it can be fruitful to redescribe the psychotherapeutic encounter through intellectual projects across the humanities which have been preoccupied with negative capability – the capacity to cope with, exist in, and actively embrace uncertainty, ambivalence and indeterminacy.