Donna Orange

Silence, at best, is ambiguous. It may protect, attack, or give consent. One may be reduced to silence either by humiliation, or out of failure to find the right word. One may be struck silent by art, by holiness, by outrageousness. Persons or groups may find themselves silenced through acts of familial, cultural or political domination, even by violence. Probably every human being has some experiences with silence, with silencing others, or having been silenced. David Kleinberg-Levin provides an evocative list, challenging all explanations:

What comes to mind are these: the heavy silence of one going deep into her grief; the silence of one whom unspeakable horror has rendered speechless; the awkward silence of shame or embarrassment; the aggressive silence of one who is hiding his guilt; the benumbed silence of a deep depression; the silence of an anger which accuses and causes hurt by using silence as a weapon; withholding the kindness of speech; the heroic silence of the political prisoner, who refuses to surrender the names of his comrades even under extremes of torture; the guarded silence of citizens who must endure constant surveillance under the rule of a police state; the silence of timidity; the silence of shyness; the silence of rapt attention; the silence of prayer; the silence of spellbound anticipation; the silence of a joy that needs to be deeply felt.

(p. 100)

No phenomenological account of silence can fail to address this array, if only indirectly.

But what is silence itself? Phenomenology, of course, ever allergic to universalizing definitions and mindful of Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, will look to descriptions and contexts. Let us first trace a meandering path through silence in the company of phenomenologists Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas. Finally, we return to the everyday silences of clinical work, to see what phenomenologists might teach working psychoanalysts, and vice versa.

Pregnant silence

Sartre, writing after the war about the resistance, saw silence as a heroic act of freedom. Kleinberg-Levin’s list surely has Sartre’s “republic of silence” in mind:

(In Liebling, 1947, pp. 498–500)

Thus Sartre teaches us first about the effects of violent silencing. He continues, indicating that keeping silence may also be heroic:

All those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew any details concerning the Resistance--asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself…. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?

(In Liebling, 1947, pp. 498–500)

Merleau-Ponty, explicitly addressing Sartre but implicitly speaking to all who have considered silence a mere lack of noise or the opposite of speech, provides another surprising account in his 1952 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”. Silence speaks, in particular through the work of Cezanne or Klee.¹ From depths before, after, under, and between words or music, but intricately involved in them and providing to them layers of meaning, silence can be full, generous, and generative. “We should consider speech before it has been pronounced,” Merleau-Ponty later wrote, “against the ground of silence which precedes it, and without which it would say nothing” (1973, pp. 45–46). When the conductor raises her baton to evoke a “Kyrie” or the expected notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when a pause follows an unexpected question, silence creates the breath or ground for music, for painting, or for language. At the end of a talk, a story, or a concert, a moment of silence, unpremeditated, may testify to the depth of feeling produced in the audience. When someone has revealed something shockingly painful, perhaps the loss of a child or a terminal prognosis, a reverent, receptive, compassionate silence must often precede any few words that may be possible. “Oh, oh, oh,” may be all we can say. Silence may accompany and witness.

Merleau-Ponty, however, meant to speak a silence even more inclusive and originary than what his earlier words have suggested to me. As in Schelling before him, he came in his last years to identify silence with nature itself,² not contrasted with language—“language lives only from silence”³—but as its very underpinning. A language, he wrote, “sometimes remains a long time pregnant with transformations which are to come… even if only in the form of a gap, a need, or a tendency” (1964, p. 41). In its indirectness, all language is silence (1964, p. 43). In his recent Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology (2016), Glen Mazis places silence at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s early account of perception as well as of his mature work on chiasm and intertwining. Silence becomes the invisible source of the visible. Not a literal silence, it occurs in painting, in music, in poetry. Expressive and lyrical, it gives sense to the sensible.

But this silence can be stumped. We can avoid it, but only at our peril. Long before computers and the internet dominated our daily lives, Merleau-Ponty warned of reducing thinking to data-collecting. In the name of science we then test, operate, and transform the data. In this way, he wrote, “we enter into a cultural regimen in which there is neither truth nor falsehood concerning humanity and history, into a sleep or nightmare from which there is no awakening” (1964, p. 122). Like Hegel’s night in which all cows are black, we have entered the postmodern era Merleau-Ponty did not live to see, but which he surely described. Our headlong rush into the big-data world comes with a loss of connection to what Merleau-Ponty in his 1952 essay would have called the “voices of silence,” as Mazis repeatedly points out.

Of course, such concern about the deadening effects of technical rationality has been common among phenomenologists, especially Heidegger, whose critique in its original form unfortunately included a far-too-casual reference to the production of corpses in concentration camps, as if nothing more had been at stake: “Farming is now a motorized food industry, in essence the same as the fabrication of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starving of the peasantry, the same as the fabrication of the hydrogen bomb” (1994, p. 27). Merleau-Ponty takes a very different path, linking cybernetics to a loss of the world’s silent and speaking wholeness, but likewise worried that reductive data-focus would lead to disastrous consequences. He might not be surprised by our climate catastrophe. When we lose the sense of shuddering and shivering as silence comes to speech, we may also lose reverence for our world, for the nature that we are.⁴

Phenomenologist Bernard Dauenhauer has considered silence as a phenomenon. He first described two types: intervening silence that punctuates speech, and second, anticipatory and afterwards silences, expectant and haunting. His third type, deep silence, links him to Merleau-Ponty, though he means perhaps something more recognizable, as he speaks of the silence of intimate contact, of liturgical silence, and of the silence-of-the-to-be-said. This last transcends all saying, but he relates it, with Gadamer, to tact and inexpressibility. Dauenhauer provides such examples as Shakespeare’s Richard the Third’s refusal to answer his victims before their execution (1980, p. 22).

Threatening silences

Phenomenologists have spent less time describing silences that menace, but the disadvantaged of the world know them well. No less pregnant than those Merleau-Ponty described in his many writings about painting, or that Wittgenstein might have included in his “showing” as contrasted with “saying,” these have quite another feel. In the natural world, we speak of “the calm before the storm.” Patients tell their analysts of parents whose silences were worse than beatings or tirades. Border agents refuse to tell children what has happened to the parents from whom they have been violently separated. People historically excluded from being counted as human—whether from skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or whatever—know that silence concerning their stories wipes out their history and threatens their further significance. “Black Lives Matter” protests such menacing silence. Naming can murder, but so can refusal to name.

Frantz Fanon (1961/2004, 1967/2008), psychiatrist and phenomenologist, described in detail the ways that speaking out of silent assumptions shaped the experience of blacks and of those suffering under colonial regimes. He had sat in Merleau-Ponty’s courses, but for him the silence was dangerous. The view or “gaze” that whites directed toward blacks and Arabs, he understood, infected their experience of themselves. Only by recontextualizing their experience, a revolutionary idea, could colonized or enslaved people gain any ground of their own. Diagnosing them as insane, or as inherently defective, silenced their own voices and made them invisible. Fanon’s psychiatric work (Gibson, 2014; Gibson & Beneduce, 2017) challenged the colonialist thinking and practice behind the psychiatric hospital and gave voices to the silenced.

Trauma-frozen silences

Another step distant from Merleau-Ponty’s silence of “mute radiance” (1964, p. 98), we find the silences involved in traumatic experience. We can distinguish, perhaps, the silence of anticipation, that of abandonment, and the failure of witness, where silence itself becomes trauma nachträglich. Assuming an understanding of psychological trauma as shockingly disorganizing experience that leaves a person disoriented in time and distrustful of self and others, we may be tempted to think of noisy violence, of school shootings, of atomic bombs, of rape. Even though these images are too often accurate, the silence before, during, and after them rarely receives its phenomenological due. If phenomenologist Emmanuel Levinas could write that his entire life had been shaped by the anticipation and memory of the Nazi horror, no wonder he wrote in the postwar years of insomnia, of the noisy and ominous silence of the il y a, always portending violence. Like single-sided deaf people who suffer from tinnitus, the traumatized hear rumbling noises reminding them that the worst can ever happen and that all can be lost. Many, of course, scream into the night, at the all-too-present realities in their nightmares. In the daytime they may be mute.

So we should not expect that Levinas would endorse either Sartre’s heroic postwar conception of silence, or Merleau-Ponty’s mystical, quasi-romantic Schellingian idea. For him, silence gives consent to violence and refuses responsibility.

Trauma therapists and students of extreme dissociative conditions have, I believe, provided important questions to phenomenology, about which philosophers have until now been all too willing to keep silent. What kind of silence fails to speak of climate catastrophe, threatening to make further speech on this subject degenerate into a hopeless wail? What kind of silence keeps me from greeting the miserable homeless person on the street asking me for a euro or a dollar? What kind of silence keeps me from asking what part my own ancestors had in supporting slavery, or in the colonizing of the so-called Terra Nullius, so that indigenous peoples were slaughtered or disastrously reduced? How did these people become nobody for me, so that I cannot even speak their names or their languages?⁵ How does a person or a group become “reduced to silence”?

And what about silence as the refusal, out of fear or out of cowardice, to witness to injustice and atrocity? Shoah producer Claude Lanzmann speaks of a “conspiracy of silence”: “There are many ways of being silent. There are some good ways, and there are very bad ways as well. To talk too much about the Holocaust is a way of being silent, and a bad way of being silent” (Caruth, 2014, p. 208). He does not explain, but clearly he sides with Merleau-Ponty in refusing to oppose speech and silence. Apparently, speech itself can obfuscate historical realities, can minimize, can silence the sufferer of atrocity.

Silence in the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas

Like Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, Levinas (1905–1995) lived before and after the occupation in Paris, but unlike them, spent the five war years in captivity in a labor camp near Hannover, where, as a French officer, he survived, but where the Jewish captives were segregated and much more harshly treated. Not for them was the genial “university in the camp” described by fellow phenomenologist Paul Ricoeur a reality. Levinas wrote:

There were seventy of us in a forestry commando unit for Jewish prisoners of war in Nazi Germany… but the other men, called free, who had dealings with us or gave us work or orders or even a smile—and the children and women who passed by and sometimes raised their eyes—stripped us of our human skin. We were subhuman, a gang of apes. A small inner murmur, the strength and wretchedness of persecuted people, reminded us of our essence as thinking creatures, but we were no longer part of the world. Our comings and goings, our sorrow and laughter, illnesses and distractions, the work of our hands and anguish of our eyes, the letters we received from France and those accepted for our families—all that passed in parenthesis. We were beings entrapped in their species; despite all their vocabulary, beings without language. Racism is not a biological concept; anti-Semitism is the archetype of all internment… It shuts people away in a class, deprives them of expression and condemns them to being ‘signifiers without a signified’… How can we deliver a message about our humanity which, from behind the bars of quotation marks, will come across as anything other than monkey talk?

And then, about halfway through our long captivity, for a few short weeks, before the sentinels chased him away, a wandering dog entered our lives. One day he came to meet this rabble as we returned under guard from work. He survived in some wild patch in the region of the camp. But we called him Bobby, an exotic name, as one does with a cherished dog. He would appear at morning assembly and was waiting for us as we returned, jumping up and down and barking in delight. For him, there was no doubt that we were men… This dog was the last Kantian in Nazi Germany, without the brain needed to universalize maxims and drives

(Levinas, 1990, pp. 152–153)

Many have written about this passage, but here I want to ask what it tells the phenomenologist about silence and affirming or negating human dignity. To speak means more than to bark out words (“Hier ist kein Warum!” from the guard to desperately thirsty Primo Levi who asks why his small icicle has been swatted away). To speak to the other may mean a joyful greeting from a pet, or from someone who cannot speak my language. It may mean recognizing without words that a sufferer is a fellow human who should never be so mistreated. Colleagues who work daily with victims of torture must listen and listen and listen to the unspeakable, bearing witness to the humanity of the other. Ironically our silent horror at what has been done to these fellow humans begins to undo their tortured silencing, if only a little. This silence trembles, on both sides.

Silence unfrozen

To unfreeze traumatic silences, speaking becomes necessary. Whatever the exact text, “Black lives matter,” “Me too,” or “Never again,” among many, this ethical speaking insists that the silenced and persecuted and murdered ones are human, and that injustice to them requires active response. Indifference by us who profit from the continued silence—we who live in the houses stolen from the deported and murdered Jews of Europe, for example, or on land stolen from indigenous peoples—deepens the trauma and further isolates those traumatized.

Psychoanalysis, the “talking cure,” has long known that speaking the unspeakable in the right context can restore, if not cure, traumatized people.⁶ Voices from the classical tradition, even after the shameful banishment of Sándor Ferenczi (Dimitrijević, Cassullo, & Frankel, 2018), have spoken for the “soul murdered” and for those nearly destroyed by historical atrocity. Relational psychoanalysis has begun to consider relational trauma, and especially the “self states” it may lead us to disavow (Bromberg, 1994; Bromberg, 1998). Intersubjective systems theorists (Atwood, 2013; Stolorow, 1995) have brought trauma—in development and adulthood—into the center of their phenomenological account of pathogenesis and psychoanalytic process. The shattered experiential world of the traumatized becomes a psychotic state to find connection and understanding by a therapist or analyst who is a brother or sister in the worlds of trauma. Often, as Davoine and Gaudillière (2004) write from a European perspective, the patient’s madness finds the analyst’s history, and connects so as to undo the wretched silencing.

Attempting to undo silencing psychoanalytically often runs directly into shame. Shame, built into most traumatic experience with its inherent degrading and dehumanizing qualities, does not add to trauma or constitute a defense against awareness of it. Instead, it pre-reflectively disempowers and disentitles the potential speaker. What right have I, so much below any ladder or scale, to speak of mistreatment or injustice done to me? The traumatized person, humiliated in many ways not always evident, has been preemptively silenced by the resulting shame. Why did I not fight off my rapist? Why did I not work harder in the face of the school’s rejection of me? Why could I not keep silent after days or weeks of torture? All these questions, and more, disqualify the traumatized from speaking, and from being heard and re-included in human community.

Shamed silence may also result from the community’s refusal of witness to massive injustice. Consider, for example, the desperate plight of those psychoanalysts who fled Germany and Austria in the 1930s only to find that many of their colleagues did not want them, either because they feared competition or because of anti-Semitism. Already terrified and alone, often without the language skills they needed, and without the medical credentials to practice in the US, they and their families faced rejection in Britain and the US, as well as terrible losses in Europe. Their traumatic experience has shaped the learning of those of us who have been their students, but has almost never been spoken or written about until recently. We have inherited the fruits of bystandership, reminding me of the words of Emmanuel Levinas, “as if consenting to horror.”

Silence as complicity

As usual, Philip Cushman has written the work on ethics, psychology, and torture that I would have wanted to write, with a thoroughness that never masks his commanding prophetic voice. Reminding me of those originals who made me shudder and cower in shame reading Abraham Heschel’s The Prophets, calling us psychologists to account for our semi-deliberate moral unconsciousness, Cushman holds us responsible—rightly, in my view—for the evils our neglect of ethical education, as well as our thoughtless “individualism, consumer capitalism, neoliberalism, scientism,” (2018a, p. 1) have wrought in our name. I have shared his trenchant critiques of these ideologies and attitudes precisely, and thus will not repeat them, but restrict myself to a few related reflections, leaning toward the psychoanalytic, since he has chosen to publish this work in a psychoanalytic journal. Though greatly honored to respond to any work from Cushman, I realize that this piece indicts me along with all our colleagues, that the deep and thick ethical failures he explains in the torture context are running, as he says, like a fault line below our professional communities, preventing us from responding adequately to current crises, leaving us befuddled and confused in just the ways he describes, polluting the work we pursue with good intentions. His prophetic warning is more than urgent.

Like Cushman’s, my concerns intersect at the crossroads of philosophy (especially phenomenology, philosophical hermeneutics, and ethics), history (including psychoanalytic history, and the histories of settler colonialism and chattel slavery), climate science, and psychoanalysis. Not for a moment to minimize the importance of all humanistic psychotherapies, it seems important to notice the ways in which psychoanalytic theories may have obfuscated ethical concerns, just as Cushman illuminates in psychology and the “psy disciplines” generally. Though I particularly want to honor those psychologist/psychoanalysts who have led the fight to expose and to end the involvement of psychologists in the US torture program, we must grant that most of us were silent, and even now inadequately horrified by the acts done in our name. I am reminded of the infamous Göring Institute of psychoanalysis in Berlin during the Third Reich, as well as of the doctors I met in Heidelberg, who no longer even call themselves psychiatrists (now it is the faculty of psychosomatics) because of the atrocities their profession had committed “in those years.” (The work of Robert Jay Lifton should surely be background reading here). Freud’s concern with unconscious motivation has not helped enough, in his time or ours, to challenge organized crimes against humanity.

Where is our commensurate shame? Perhaps the same moral fault lines, made up of individualism, scientism, and Irwin Hoffman’s (2009) masterfully described “doublethinking”, leading us to moral fog and evasion, now keep us underreacting to the support that organized psychology gave the Bush torture program, which now threatens to resume. All that is needed for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing, according to an idea often attributed to Edmund Burke.⁷ Cushman explains how the deep structure of the psychological professions, almost never examined and brought into dialogue, make it almost impossible to generate the kind of ethical deliberation that might have put on the brakes, or activated the “good people.” But given that our deep assumptive structures continue unquestioned by most, what other horrors may we be supporting or overlooking? Our colleagues of color could tell us the answer if we would give them five minutes. So could the millions of climate refugees. So Cushman’s prophetic demand to consider our sins of individualistic and consumerist mindlessness—Warren Poland likes to define the unconscious as what we do not want to know about ourselves—also constitutes a call to psychoanalysis, to meaning-and-dialogue-oriented psychotherapy, to a kind of human and ethical work never to be doublethought into a STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) discipline.

Unfortunately, just as Cushman suggests, we contemporary psychoanalysts—like our grandparents who excluded humanistic and ethical voices like Erich Fromm, Erik Erikson, and John Bowlby—lean, perhaps unintentionally, toward ethical ambiguity. Some advocates of multiple self-states,⁸ asked who is responsible for voting in their name in elections, fall silent. No one is responsible when everyone is standing in the spaces.⁹ (I do it myself, living intricately implicated in an extreme capitalist system that systemically destroys millions of innocent human lives, and the planet that could support them.) The autonomous ego of ego psychology was, of course, too simple to describe complex relationally emergent self-experience, but the developmentally and relationally described ego of Hans Loewald, for example, appropriated from the parents its moral responsibilities. Without a theory and practice of ethical selfhood,¹⁰ I believe, we cannot expect psychoanalysis to lead the “psy disciplines” in creating moral dialogues, even protests, to resist ethical fogs and ambiguities like those that permitted us to stand by while psychologists participated in torture in our names. If we theorize away the possibility of integrity and responsibility, we are lost.

Pretending to be a hard science will not solve our problem. In a STEM discipline, as in our omnipresent devices, everything functions by rules. If the rules are properly formulated, everything runs just fine. Bending the rules will cause crashes. Even malware runs by the rules, showing us that the rules are indeed value-free.¹¹ In our human sciences trying to be STEM sciences, though, we tend to ignore those ethical problems that cause crashes in human relationships, that reduce human beings to things, in Cushman’s elegant and horrifying language:

How did we allow this series of betrayals, humiliations, and sadistic acts to be thought of as a subject of legal debate, instead of recognizing it as an ethical scandal? Torture is an utterly reprehensible act, unjustifiable both ethically and practically. It is a betrayal that wounds the very soul of the prisoner (Apuzzo, Fink, & Risen, 2016), degrades the perpetrator, and undermines the moral integrity of the society that is responsible for it. It starkly illuminates what must be considered the most egregious of human mistakes: treating fellow humans as things to be used, not precious lives to be cherished and honored. It…is the graphic and perhaps most extreme enactment of an instrumental relationship, one that strikes at the very core of human social existence by its objectification of the other and its denial of the limits of one’s own understandings. It is in part what the Hebrew prophets meant by idolatry (see Fromm, 1955, 1966): the process by which humans first uncritically admire and worship inanimate and human-made creations such as wealth, automobiles, social status, national emblems, revanchist fantasies, or demagogic behavior, and by so doing are themselves turned into things.

(2018a, p. 10)

No one who remembers Jean Améry’s description of the first time he was tortured could claim that Cushman exaggerates. But Améry preceded his story with a quotation from British novelist Graham Greene who commented on photographs of Vietcong torture emerging in the American and British press at the time:

(Quoted in Améry, 1980, p. 23)

Améry commented: “The admission of torture, the boldness—but is it still that?—of coming forward with such photos is explicable only if it is assumed that a revolt of public conscience is no longer to be feared” (1980, p. 23). So these questions, possible and actual long before the Bush administration, make it clear that the climate for shoulder-shrugging in the US, and in psychology cultures, was fertile soil, with little opposition to be expected, after 9/11. And psychoanalysis, with a stronger intellectual tradition, could do no better?

But ethical scandals tend not to be the topics of our training, conferences, or journals. Not only do we fail to learn the hermeneutic dialogue necessary to consider ethical questions in depth and to confront their meanings, but when breaches of this magnitude do “occur” (note my minimizing, anonymizing language), we do not immediately devote our next national or international conference to them. A few concerned souls may offer one panel, probably not even a plenary. We do not, for the most part, engage in collective soul-searching, asking how we could have been complicit in so much evil, or even what exactly is wrong with torture.

And yet, why should we be surprised? When famous psychoanalysts have committed egregious sexual boundary violations, sometimes even leading to loss of professional licenses, institutions have protected them despite widespread knowledge, as if the offender’s privacy were more important than our duty to protect patients and trainees. Sometimes senior colleagues even invite the offender to social gatherings and continue to teach his papers and books, as if to say to trainees that respecting and protecting patients does not matter. Wink, wink, nod, nod. He or she is one of us. “Could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and no one would object.” Or senior colleagues may blame the patient, to training committees or licensing boards. Of course, the offender cannot then explain to self or others why the transgression was wrong, or why the boundary is a boundary. Not to mention the confusion of tongues, and debilitating shame, resulting for the patient or trainee. Our collective failure to engage in ongoing ethical dialogues in our training institutes, journals, and conferences stems from the scientism that Cushman and Hoffman describe, and reinforces it. Discussion about ethics usually comes down to making the rules ever more precise—I have just seen the draft of a psychoanalytic institute’s 20-page ethics code, which does attempt to be a statement of both values and rules. We keep hoping that precision in our rules will rescue us from needing to engage in moral discourse, and moral reasoning. But we must resort to genuine education. Cushman writes: “The absence of philosophically learned moral discourse in the profession leads to a thin, easily manipulated relation with ethics” (2018b, p. 13). Without practice in such ethical dialogue, leading to practical wisdom, we are like people who need to learn to swim when already drowning. With only rules to guide us, we become experts at bending them, as Cushman warns.

To summarize my first thought, I believe we should heed Cushman’s call to take ourselves seriously as an alternative to the valueless, foggy, procedural, reductive, liquid “discourse” of postmodernity. We hermeneuts in psychology and in psychoanalysis (Cushman, 2007, 2011; Orange, 2010, 2011; Stern, 2013) can speak up for racial justice, climate justice, ethical treatment of patients, and opposition to torture, for example. We can invite those who think psychotherapy concerns more than techniques and technologies, and especially those who think it probably concerns something else entirely, to talk ethics with us. Perhaps our conversations, and ethical worries, will bleed out into the larger cultures where they are so urgently needed.

My second thought concerns the reading of history as an ethical project. Scientistic approaches to psychology, psychotherapy, and worst of all, to psychoanalysis, lose track of the old dictum that those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it—a good reason to read the Hoffman report, Cushman’s article, and the writings of those closely familiar with this awful story. But worse, by not studying history, including this history, we are already repeating. We continue the fog, the obfuscation “bad things happened,” and the evasions. Somebody else did it, far away. Chattel slavery, settler colonialism? Somebody else did it, long ago.

And yet, just this summer, wanting to know more about the history of Maine where I usually spend summers, and looking to Wikipedia as the handiest resource, I “learned” that Maine’s history began with the French and the British. Surrounded by names like Penobscot and Kennebec and Passagassawakeag, and having read Wendy Warren’s (2016) New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in the New World I remembered that the earliest colonists from Massachusetts had sent others to Maine to take the land and eliminate those few indigenous people who had survived the plagues already brought from Europe. The beauty of Maine hides a brutal, criminal history of over-entitled Europeans appropriating communally held land in the name of religion, but for economic gain. Only a few of its original people remain to protect and honor their Penobscot, Wabanaki cultures. If we look beyond the surface of the history we have been taught, we prepare ourselves for moral questioning.

Thus, I believe that each of us must study some aspect of the history of moral oppression and crimes if we are to develop the needed sensitivities to stop repeating. We already know this in families. Because my nine siblings and I talk about the conditions of our past, it has become possible for one of my younger sisters to write a statement to be read at her funeral: “no one in our generation ever beat their children.” Repeating can be stopped, usually through dialogic examination of what went wrong and what it all means, both individually and culturally. Lynching, and its more recent imitators, stops only if we study its history and the attitudes—conscious and unconscious—it expresses. Psychoanalytic devotion to this type of understanding means protecting our precious dialogic legacy from the threat of doublethinking, and from physics envy. In search of scientific legitimacy, we lose and betray the most precious gift we have to offer our patients and the larger world. We also refuse ethical responsibility.

This brings me to my title point, the Miranda warning: you have the right to remain silent. Yes, when I am being approached by law enforcement as if I were a criminal, this precious right may save me. Still, it cannot become my fundamental life organizing principle. When you are starving, falling, being mistreated, being tortured, I may not remain silent. Now we have crossed over from law into ethics. Cushman asks: “How did we allow this series of betrayals, humiliations, and sadistic acts to be thought of as a subject of legal debate, instead of recognizing it as an ethical scandal?” (2018b, p. 10). The difference between parsing out legal distinctions—important as these may be—and responding ethically, corresponds to the difference between machine-like rule-following and protecting the vulnerable Other, whose fate, directly or indirectly, may be in my hands. Learning, over and over, the relation and difference between law and morality requires conversation about such matters from childhood through graduate school and professional education to the end of life. Reading books like lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy (2014) helps us understand that laws can be seriously unjust, and that, as he often repeats, each person is better than the worst thing he or she has ever done. No moral calculus here, but an ethical conversation about justice beyond law. Reading history, to return to my point above, stretches our moral sensibilities to include people we might not otherwise notice or include in our concerns. In the face of gross injustices all around us, in which we participate pervasively, we do not have the right to remain silent. We psychologists and psychoanalysts are citizens, and fellow human beings. Philip Cushman has now spoken out, challenging the most fundamental attitudes and assumptions in our professions, breaking our silence on behalf of those who cannot speak for themselves. Who will be next?

In conclusion

Belatedly, we are learning to hear. “Philosophy,” Merleau-Ponty wrote in his last work, The Visible and the Invisible, “is the reconversion of silence and speech into one another” (1968, p. 169/129).¹² Finding words for the unspeakably beautiful and the unspeakably horrible, inadequate as these words will always be, even perhaps poetic words, philosophy does only one half of its job. In the other half, we lapse back into silence, as Wittgenstein reminded us: whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent. Silent before that which demands reverence, silence before what exceeds words either by way of sublimity or horror.

The artist faces the same problem as the philosopher: on the wall of Beethoven’s house in Heiligenstadt are Kant’s words: the starry heavens above and the moral law within. In this very house where Beethoven wrote both his heart-wrenching Testament expressing his suicidal thoughts over his encroaching deafness, and also some of his greatest music, he faced the problem of silence. To break it he wrote music; to accept silence, the music ends, and he walks in the fields.

So a phenomenology of silence arrives at no definition, but finds an omnipresent feature of human life that punctuates and pervades it, under and beyond all the noise. Silence also threatens, as in deafness and in violence. It protects the guilty, often for generations, and creates false innocence. But it may, at times, express the profoundest reverence.

Notes

1 Bindeman (2017, p. 66) quotes: “We usually say that the painter reaches us across the silent world of lines and colors, and that he addresses himself to an unformulated power of deciphering within us that we control only after we have blindly used it—after we have enjoyed the work” (Merleau-Ponty, 1964, p. 45).

2 It remains to study the voice of Spinoza running through The Phenomenology of Perception (Merleau-Ponty & Landes, 2012), an influence perhaps deeper than that of Schelling.

3 “Language lives only from silence, everything which we cast to the others lives in this mute land which we do not leave” (Merleau-Ponty, 1968, p. 126).

4 There is far more to be said about Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of silence, but space limitations and also respect force me to refer the reader on to Glen Mazis.

5 Many questions for the phenomenologist/clinician belong here: Does my silence about race, gender, history, violence, further silence my patient? Do I implicitly try to evade responsibility by my silence?

6 See also the thoughtful and challenging work on restorative justice, e.g. (Stauffer, 2015).

7 Here is the long version: “Whilst men are linked together, they easily and speedily communicate the alarm of any evil design. They are enabled to fathom it with common counsel, and to oppose it with united strength. Whereas, when they lie dispersed, without concert, order, or discipline, communication is uncertain, counsel difficult, and resistance impracticable. Where men are not acquainted with each other’s principles, nor experienced in each other’s talents, nor at all practiced in their mutual habitudes and dispositions by joint efforts in business; no personal confidence, no friendship, no common interest, subsisting among them; it is evidently impossible that they can act a public part with uniformity, perseverance, or efficacy. In a connection, the most inconsiderable man, by adding to the weight of the whole, has his value, and his use; out of it, the greatest talents are wholly unserviceable to the public. No man, who is not inflamed by vain-glory into enthusiasm, can flatter himself that his single, unsupported, desultory, unsystematic endeavours, are of power to defeat the subtle designs and united cabals of ambitious citizens. When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.” (Burke, 1999).

8 Here I distinguish “states” from parts, with Onno van der Hart and others who expertly and compassionately teach us to treat those sufferers from extreme violence who live in parts not even remembered by other parts.

9 I (Orange, 2018) have discussed this problem at length elsewhere, and noted that Bromberg seems recently to be reversing course toward a more integrated sense of self. It is also true that some proponents of this type of postmodern theory involve themselves in ethical critique and political activism.

10 I am not claiming here that we possess a substantialized or reified thing called “a self” (see critiques by Stolorow, 1995), but rather that the phenomenological and ethical sense of more- or less-integrated selfhood, responsible for actions, attitudes, and bystanding, needs theorizing in psychoanalysis if we are to escape our ethical fog (Orange, 2013).

11 Cushman formulates our STEM aspiration problem perfectly when he writes: “when psychology claims a scientistic warrant, it is in the unenviable position of trying to determine good ways for humans to live by using a method that claims it has bracketed off all ideas about good ways to live” (2018b, p. 19).

12 I am grateful to Sean Williams (2010) for alerting me to this passage as well as to Merleau-Ponty’s important connection to Schelling.

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Chapter 1

Silence in phenomenology