On Silence

A while ago I found myself thinking about the uses of silence in psychotherapy . That was after our psychoanalytic technique teacher, a Zen master, described a session where a patient had slept through the entire hour, waking up pleased and at peace. The analyst had spoken no word during the session. This was amazing to me. I felt and still feel that to be so silent is not to do my work.

Yet I am aware of a certain progression in my attitude toward silence over time. Early in my career, I was speaking too much, over-interrogating and over-interpreting. If my process looked too much like a theatrical dialogue, with a 'he said / she said' verbal rhythm, my supervisor was unhappy. I learned it was better to let there be silences. These might be filled by a patient looking into the self to see where the connections or disruptions lie (no pun intended). I learned the advantages of the therapist’s offering of full presence in silence. And I have also learned a paradox on this subject – silence is sometimes valued more by the therapist than the patient. Still, the important thing is that the patient is not alone, he has a listener with time and space free for him. I think of one of the great narrators, Geoffrey of The General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, who says “when I have time and space . . . it seems to me reasonable to tell you of folk . . . each and every one.” So Chaucer understood something that analysts learn eventually: that the time and space for talking is a gift from a listening other. Someone presents, others have to give us that space, that offering of expanse and leisure for inner experience. First, there is exploration and then there is narration, itself a kind of counting and recounting, learning who we are and telling the tale we found within ourselves. We tell it in speech, but we find it in silence.

So it’s an achievement to be silent and I have in mind Winnicott wishing he had interpreted less in his early days. It is always better to have the patient (like the student) say it him or herself.

So why do I have a lingering fear of silence? I think if I go to a bottom line because I do not wish to go on and on, there are two rather weighty matters in the countertransference that I need to take into account here (and I fear I shall have to get personal). One is that somewhere I seem to think that speech is a private matter incumbent upon me – as if, if I don’t talk no one else will and therefore speech itself depends on my continual participation. I’m not sure where this comes from – maybe in competition from my story-telling father who never stopped describing his years in the Russian Army, or maybe it was to encourage my mother, often silent and depressed, a holocaust survivor. I’m not sure, but I do think there’s some – perhaps understandable – grandiosity in it, and I like to think I’m getting over it.

But then again, I think somewhere I’m afraid of silence, and that also might be from my mother, and all the things that she wasn’t saying, but that actually did come out sometimes, and they were frightening and grim.

I was going to end there, perhaps abruptly, so I’ll say that the subjectivity of my ending may be understood as a question – what attaches my reader to either silence or speech?