Some Preliminary Observations on Stupidity
Vanessa Cediel is a Venezuelan-Canadian psychologist based in Montreal who has practiced from a psychoanalytic perspective since 2007. She completed her doctoral studies under the supervision of Louis Brunet with an essay titled “Self-Analysis: A Theoretical and Critical Review of Its Possibilities and Impossibilities as a Psychoanalytic Instrument” (2025). She also contributed to the collective volume "Pour une renaissance de la psychanalyse québécoise" (Toward a Renaissance of Psychoanalysis in Quebec; 2025), edited by Nicolas Lévesque and published by Presses de l’Université de Montréal. Alongside her psychoanalytic practice, she specializes in psychological assessments for complex immigration cases. She is currently developing a project that brings the works of French psychoanalyst Anne Dufourmantelle, Ukrainian-born Brazilian writer Clarice Lispector, and German dancer and choreographer Pina Bausch into a dialogue about the unknown.
A few months ago, I attended a conference in Montreal organized by Revue Filigrane, one of North America’s major francophone psychoanalytic journals. The theme was the impact of artificial intelligence on psychic development and the clinical practice. The speakers offered a range of perspectives, from the benefits of AI to the unsettling (but not unrealistic) possibility of psychotherapy being replaced by sophisticated algorithms. As tempted as I am to elaborate on these insightful presentations on AI, I will share a thought that crossed my mind several times during the conference:
How come we are talking so much about AI and so little about human stupidity (HS)?
Hearing the words artificial intelligence repeatedly must have had an effect on me. I began asking myself about a possible counterpart. So, a few days later, I remembered reading many lives ago an exquisite book by the Spanish psychoanalyst Manuel Pérez-Sánchez, titled: "Aprender del bebé. Filosofar psicoanalítico” (2010)[1]. Initially, I recalled reading a whole chapter on stupidity. To my surprise, I went through the table of contents and there wasn’t any particular chapter devoted to the topic. Then, I began perusing the pages I ad underlined, and nothing. Did I imagine it? Maybe. I began to reread the book and found this passage in the preliminary pages:
"As an aside, I would like to say that this is a book about our psychoanalytic ignorance, an attempt to avoid falling prey to stupidity and the arrogant conceit of knowing. At one point, I had thought of making this book a study about stupidity, but I realized that this was a more arrogant than stupid undertaking, or vice versa, in believing myself immune to lapsing into either banality or emptiness. I soon set it aside, though without forgetting it, so as not to succumb to the vacuity of its pretensions. Thus, I leave the reference here, to be kept in mind" (p.21; my translation; my italics).
This paragraph was, and still is, particularly interesting to me. For it addresses the perils of examining stupidity and the precautions we must bear in mind about our own stupidity, pretentiousness, arrogance, banality and vacuity. Perhaps, this aside also makes reference to the triad proposed by Bion in his article “On arrogance” (1958): with its components being stupidity, arrogance, and curiosity. So, keeping Pérez-Sanchez’s caution in mind and Bion’s triad I started searching for references on stupidity in different psychoanalytic sources.
"How come we are talking so much about AI and so little about human stupidity (HS)? How come this dimension hasn’t been explored more thoroughly? And what can this be saying about our thinking or not thinking about human stupidity (HS)?"
To begin with, I wondered if in some of the psychoanalytic dictionaries there was an entry for “stupidity”. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly enough, I found the following. In Laplanche and Pontalis dictionary there isn’t. In Hinshelwood’s A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought there isn’t. In López-Corvo’s The Dictionary of the Work of W. R. Bion, there is a combined entry under arrogance, curiosity and stupidity. The same for Sandler’s The Language of Bion: A Dictionary of Concepts (2005), it is present under Arrogance. Idem for Mijolla’s International Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. Usually, stupidity is mentioned, as a reference to Bion’s triad, under the entry of Arrogance. It is the same case in Salman Akhtar’s Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychoanalysis, defined within the entry arrogance, curiosity, and pseudo-stupidity. Moreover, out of roughly 160,000 articles available on the Pep-Web as of October 2026, a total of 1,150 include the word “stupidity” within the text. However, only eleven articles can be retrieved when one looks up stupidity within the title (roughly 0.006%). Although, my search wasn’t an extensive one nor it is conceived as a rigorous scientific study on the matter, I was perplexed and intrigued.
How come this dimension hasn’t been explored more thoroughly? And what can this be saying about our thinking or not thinking about human stupidity (HS)?
Let’s stay close to Bion’s “On arrogance” in order to grasp some impressions on stupidity. Recently, Civitarese (2024) published an essay with the same title, to revisit the importance of this seminal paper and to dialogue with different disciplines, particularly philosophy. In it, he revisits arrogance from myriad perspectives: as a symptom, a personality trait, a disease afflicting psychoanalysis and/or the analyst, as a social dynamic, among others. He further develops Bion’s idea that Oedipus is “blinded” by his arrogance in his determination to uncover the truth at all costs. In this reading, the impulse to know (curiosity) becomes a relentless pursuit (arrogance) that disregards its psychic and social consequences (stupidity). Later in the book, he elaborates on arrogance as the presumption that one can grasp the truth, regardless of the cost, even when one’s understanding remains shallow or superficial. Stupidity lies in the illusion of having truly grasped what one has only superficially apprehended[2]. As this author explains, arrogance arises from traumatic experiences, particularly not being recognized and loved. The experience of non-recognition would lead to, what Hannah Arendt warned us about, the most banal form in which evil could surface. So, where do we go from here? Is arrogance the preponderant element of Bion’s triad? Is it the more “malignant” one and, hence, the one that receives more attention? Is the curiosity to know about stupidity too arrogant and, therefore, too stupid?
Before delving a bit more into stupidity, I wanted to share some of the mechanisms inherently present in the triad and, particularly in arrogance. According to Civitarese (2024), this type of thought is characterized by splitting, detachment from living thought, an abstract logic that considers contradiction but does not respect the truth, the isolation from affect, the privileging of intellect over and in detriment of corporeality, fallacious intellectual artifices, obstinate and mechanical rationality. Quoting Mancini, Civitarese (2024) describes an unreality that becomes effective. The dynamic of power, through arrogance, manifests itself in the impossibility of thinking based on “the lack of freedom and spiritual subjectivity, from the emptiness constituted by its devastating self-referentiality. It can produce automatic logics that are ‘rigorous’ because they are oppressive and not because they are authentically rigorous” (p. 7).
"Truth escapes us and we might never be who we think we are... Stupidity lies in the illusion of having truly grasped what one has only superficially apprehended"
I will move from psychoanalysis and philosophy and go a bit into literature. In the speech given by Milan Kundera, when he received the Jerusalem prize in 1985[3], he talks about Europe, the art of the novel and how little credit it has being given to this art form. In it, he addresses the great achievements of the XIX century: the discovery of the locomotive, Hegels’s conviction that he has grasped the very spirit of Universal history and, what Kundera considered, the greatest accomplishment of the century: Flaubert’s discovery of stupidity[4]. In a century so proud (and we might venture to say, so arrogant) about its scientific thought this discovery shouldn’t go unnoticed (Kundera, 1986). As this author writes:
"Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert’s novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agelastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert’s vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!" (p.155; 1986; my italics).
Stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. A dimension that hasn’t received proper attention and study. In a Bionian twist, Kundera (1986) declares that modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas. Moreover, in a rather controversial stance, he pushes forward the idea that Flaubert’s discovery is even more important for the future than the most groundbreaking ideas proposed by Freud or even Marx. As he sees it, one could imagine a world without psychoanalysis but not one: “without the irresistible flood of received ideas that—programmed into computers, propagated by the mass media—threaten soon to become a force that will crush all original and individual thought and thus will smother the very essence of the European culture of the Modern Era” (p. 155-156; 1986).
How can we understand why this dimension of the mind has not been explored more thoroughly? I do not claim to have the answer, but I would like to share a memory that came to mind as I reflected on this question. While working in a psychiatric service, I once had a conversation with a colleague about the need to repress our awareness of death and our own mortality in everyday life. Without such repression, we wondered, how could we function in the face of the intensity of our death anxieties—and, perhaps, the agony of remaining constantly in touch with them? I wonder—and this is my conjecture—whether something similar might be at work in our relationship with our own stupidity: a need to repress and/or deny, to varying degrees, our capacity to act stupidly, or indeed to be stupid. To embody stupidity without being able to think or speak about it, because the emotions that could emerge, including but not limited to shame. This last thought brings me back, inevitably, to Bion: to the threats we encounter in thinking and feeling and to the attacks we direct against these very capacities that keep us psychically and humanly alive.
Taking a more humorous approach, we might turn to Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum (1989). In the novel, Jacopo Belbo offers a peculiar classification of humanity: cretins, fools, morons, and lunatics. He suggests that all of us—himself included—contain a reasonable combination of these tendencies. We might wonder what “reasonable” might mean to the author. Yet, reasonable or unreasonable, the suggestion is that we harbor something of each, including a generous dose of stupidity. I will not explore each category in detail here. What interests me, instead, is how stupidity intersects with other qualities and states of mind. How might we distinguish folly from stupidity? What forms does stupidity take when coupled with innocence, and how do these differ from those associated with malevolence or evil? Can we speak of a lucid stupidity—one in which awareness of our stupidity coexists with our continued enactment of it? (this aspect evoking Bion’s theory of links and the minus domain, particularly minus knowledge [-K]).
"Stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. A dimension that hasn’t received proper attention and study... modern stupidity means not ignorance but the nonthought of received ideas. Being curious about stupidity doesn’t make us less stupid. It just makes us more available to knowing about it, containing it and, hopefully, transforming it for our mental growth."
If stupidity can be understood as a trigger for the enactment of arrogant impulses, is it not time to examine it as a dimension in its own right, with intrinsic qualities that distinguish it from arrogance even as the two remain closely intertwined? Moreover, following Kundera’s reflections on Flaubert, might we consider stupidity not as something that recedes as science, technology, and modernity advance, but as something that flourishes alongside them—perhaps even outpacing the very progress we presume would diminish it? Not with some irony, Kundera’s speech (1986) is also known under the title: “Man thinks, God laughs.”. He explains this proverb saying:
"But why does God laugh when he sees man thinking? Because man thinks and the truth escapes him. Because the more people think, the further one person’s thinking is from another’s. And finally, because man is never what he thinks he is." (p.151; my italics)
Truth escapes us and we might never be who we think we are. With these limitations, and as challenging as it may be, we must contain and explore our stupidity as another dimension of the mind. With its own qualities and characteristics, and not only as an elongation of arrogance. Will we be at risk of assuming a vacuous, pretentious, arrogant and stupid position? Yes, probably. Always. But being curious about it might pave the way for containing it, for thinking it, for transforming it and integrating it better. As it is the case with other psychic elements present in all of us. Being curious about hate, doesn’t eliminate our own hate or hateful aspects. Being curious about envy, doesn’t make us any less envious. Being curious about stupidity doesn’t make us less stupid. It just makes us more available to knowing about it, containing it and, hopefully, transforming it for our mental growth
I wish to thank the Free Association Lisbon and Iuri Conceiçao for inviting me to participate in this blog. To Alejandra Cabrera and Cynthia Rodríguez for discussing these ideas, for sharing their thoughts and nurturing my writing.
Footnotes:
[1] “Learning from the Baby. Psychoanalytic Philosophizing” (my translation).
[2] Another author who explored Bion’s comprehension of the Oedipus tragedy from the perspective of arrogance and knowledge (±K) was the Cuban-Venezuelan psychoanalyst Antonio García. A beautiful essay he wrote bears the delightful and irreverent title “Cómo ser huevón y creérselo” (1997) (roughly translated: “How to be a moron and believe it” and was later included in his book: “Pensamientos en Psicoanálisis” (2008).
[3] In his speech, he accepts the prize as a “romancier” or novelist and not as a writer. It would take a detour from this discussion to go into more details about it. However, I find the difference he makes quite interesting and running along similar lines with the discussion on arrogance.
[4] In the French version of the speech the term used is “bêtise”. In Spanish and English, it is translated as stupidity. Although bêtise could imply silliness or foolishness, the translation to stupidity seems accurate and aligned with the Kundera’s ideas.
References
Civitarese, G. (2024). On Arrogance. Routledge.
Eco, U. (1989). El péndulo de Foucault (R. Pochtar, Trad.). Lumen.
Kundera, M. (1986). L’art du roman. Gallimard.
Pérez-Sánchez, M. (2010). Aprender del bebé: Filosofar psicoanalítico. Biblioteca Nueva.
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