Chapter 11

Silence as a condition for analytic listening

Site, situation and process

Howard B. Levine

I

In a recent paper published in the Revue Francaise de Psychanalyse, Evelyne Sechaud (2018) argued that as a behavior, the silence of the psychoanalyst “encompasses complex and highly varied aspects.” She distinguishes “between silence as a speech act [i.e., a refusal to speak] and silence as a condition of analytic listening” (p. 89)¹ and thereby calls attention to what we might describe as the “active” and “receptive” dimensions of the analyst’s silence. (Of course, “being receptive” is also an action, but it has the connotation of “taking in” rather than “doing to” and this is a distinction that I wish to emphasize).

Sechaud further notes that like the fundamental rule, the use of the couch, frequent meetings and the fixed and limited time of the sessions, the analyst’s silence “is among the conditions required for the analyzing situation” (p. 90, italics added). That is, the role and function of the analyst’s silence occupies a place in the analysis that we can qualify as metapsychological. In this chapter, I will attempt to build upon Sechaud’s observations and explore the ways in which the analyst’s silence structures the analytic setting, draws the patient’s attention to the dimension of psychic reality and relates to the analytic process. In so doing, I hope to demonstrate the sense in which the analyst’s silence is a necessary component of the analytic situation and a resource of the analytic site (Donnet 2009).

The analytic site is a term introduced by Jean-Luc Donnet (2009) in his book, The Analyzing Situation. There, he suggests that the structure of the analytic situation offers to patients a unique functional ensemble that includes:

• The presence of the analyst as a transference object available for both repetition and the creation of new experience.
• The functional capacities of the analyst’s psyche as a more highly developed psychic organization (Loewald 1960) – i.e., the analyst’s alpha function (Bion 1962) and capacity for figurability² (Botella and Botella 2005) – that may be temporarily placed at the patient’s disposal to aid the latter in his or her psychic regulation and homeostasis.
• The analytic frame and space, which often first begins inside the mind of the analyst and later extends to the intersubjective and interpersonal space that forms between analyst and analysand, in which the opportunity for transference development and analysis, for self-discovery and recollection and for the creation and strengthening of the psyche may occur.³

In regard to the patient, Winnicott (1958) noted that the capacity to be alone in the presence of the other is both a developmental achievement and an important sign of emotional growth. Its appearance in the analysis “may be represented by a silent phase or a silent session, and this silence, far from being evidence of resistance, turns out to be an achievement on the part of the patient.” (p. 416). But in order for this experience to occur, it requires the reciprocal participation of a silent, accepting, non-intrusive object (analyst).

In a well-functioning analytic process, the absence produced and the space symbolized and created by the silence of the analyst are essential to the strengthening and/or creation of the patient’s framing structure (Green 1980) and to the capacity to create meaningful personal narratives that reinforce one’s sense of subjectivity and identity.⁴ In addition, the silence of the analyst symbolizes and is needed to maintain what Laplanche (1992) called the hollow of the transference (“transference en crue”): i.e., the open space in which new translations of the enigmatic may emerge into saturated, ideationally represented forms.

A further essential function of the analyst’s silence relates to the analyst’s management of the potentially obstructive dimensions of the countertransference and the maintenance of proper technique. Silence offers the analyst the time and space in which to transform and “tame” his or her own excitations of infantile sexuality (love and hate) that inevitably arise from the analytic encounter and so allows the analyst the possibility of maintaining a capacity for analytic thinking (Sechaud 2018, pp. 91–93).⁵

If properly used, the analyst’s silence and other resources of the site can help the patient create a useful and usable transference-based dynamism, so that a psychotherapeutic conversation can develop into an analytic discourse and “the working situation becomes analyzing” (Donnet 2009, p. 36, italics in original). The capacity to use the resources of the site, however, cannot be taken for granted. Especially when working with non-neurotic patients and states of mind, the patient’s incapacity to use the resources of the site is often at the heart of the very problems that need to be addressed within the treatment.

When the analyst fails to recognize and address this incapacity – and this failure may at times be abetted by a theory that fails to take into account the technical implications of the functional difference between neurotic and non-neurotic character structures and levels of psychic organization⁶ – the necessary, facilitating place and role of the analyst’s silence may be lost sight of and become confused with the analyst’s personal difficulties, conflicts and countertransference. For example, Green (1977) notes that borderline patients

are dependent on affective communication [and] seem to need a sharing of their experience, which does not mean collusion with it, in a non-intrusive exchange which gives them a feeling of existence, in which sufficient space can be formed, albeit manufactured space, for their silent self, and where the defensive meaning of their state can be acquired without their being a compression of their inner world.

(pp. 200–201)

In the past, the indiscriminant and overly stringent application of a draconian idea of abstinence and neutrality was responsible for precipitating crises in the treatment of some borderline and psychosomatic patients, giving rise to the mistaken assumption that psychoanalysis was not an appropriate treatment for these diagnoses.⁷

II

In classical formulations of the treatment of neurotic patients, the manifest rationale of the analyst’s silence – e.g., the analyst’s refusal to answer questions, meet demands for advice, offer opinions, and so on – is meant to convey a stance of abstinence and is “the warrant of … [the analyst’s] neutrality” (Sechaud 2018, p. 94). Viewed from this perspective, we can see the analyst’s silence as an expectable, consciously applied component of analytic technique that aims:

1. 1. To deny overt or covert gratification to unconscious drive-related impulses.
2. 2. To mark the difference between analytic discourse and the manifest speech of “ordinary” social conversation, so as to better draw out and frame the latent meanings of the latter (Sechaud 2018).

However, as contemporary analytic experience has shown, the matter is more complicated.

As a refusal to speak (Versagung), the analyst’s silence may, of course, also reflect – or be presumed by the patient to reflect – personal factors, conflicts or countertransference in its original, narrow sense. For example, silence may result from or signal the analyst’s fatigue, illness, boredom, confusion, frustration, anger, retaliation, hatred, defense against erotic feelings, etc. From this perspective, these silences or dimensions of the analyst’s silence may be seen as impediments to the analytic process that arise from inevitable moments of human imperfection.

When viewed through the lens of unconscious enactments and actualizations of transference configurations, however, these silences may also be seen as appearing under the aegis of the repetition compulsion. That is, as necessary scenic presentation (Argelander 2013) that direct attention to and offer opportunities for analytic reworking of the traumatic disruptions caused by object absence and the failure of provision of once-needed facilitating environmental responses. Recall Freud’s (1914) comment that one cannot slay the enemy in absentia, Sandler’s (1976) description of role responsiveness, Winnicott’s (1974) “Fear of breakdown” paper, etc. Each of these formulations implies that “the past” relevant to the therapeutic action of psychoanalytic is not that of the historical past, which is no longer present, but the ever recurring “past” of the here-and-now transference enactment and repetition.

Under such circumstances, the “micro-failures” that occur within the analytic process – including countertransference driven enactments – are often painful, unconsciously created moments of negative transference relationship and anti-process that in retrospect may simultaneously be seen as inevitable and even essential occasions of actualization, role responsiveness and enactment. To the extent that they reflect the mobilization of past traumatic experiences and maladaptive internalized object relations that need to be unconsciously conjured into life and repeated and relived in the transference in order to be noticed and addressed, they are analytic opportunities. If recognized and treated successfully as such, they may become the seeds from which representations, thoughts and psychic structure may potentially evolve.

Although contemporary psychoanalysis, from Heimann (1950) and Racker (1988) down to our present day, has recognized a great deal about the inevitability, value and use of the analyst’s countertransference, it remains an open question and matter of debate about whether or to what extent there is a difference between the analyst’s subjectivity, the analyst’s unconscious countertransference and the analyst’s receptivity to the absorption and enactment of the patient’s projective identifications.

I have argued (Levine and Friedman, 2000) that these concepts each reflect the unitary phenomena of intersubjectivity and inter-affectivity, as seen from a somewhat different perspective and applied with a somewhat different purpose in mind. So, for example, if we are considering the analyst’s contributions to the anti-process of a session or analysis, we may talk of countertransference. If we speak of the mobilization and enactment of a negative transference relationship that is then recognized and addressed, we may talk of projective identification, receptivity, actualization and enactment. The difference between these designations may depend upon whether or to what extent any given analytic pair will be able to recognize and make good analytic use of the scene and situation that has been unconsciously created and brought to life.⁸

From the perspective of the psychology of the analyst, the underlying dynamics of any given situation, whether it turns out to be a contribution to the obstructive countertransference or to the progressive movement of the analytic process, are one and the same. Based on personal history, internal dynamics, analytic theory, etc., each analyst has a unique subjectivity, associative tendency and unconsciously preferred channels of listening, hearing and responding that will offer to the patient’s unconscious the specific “hook” within that analyst on which the patient’s projections, once they are absorbed by the analyst, will hang. These hooks offer a unique contribution to the creation of what will be the narrative of each particular analysis. In so doing, they will, along with the patient’s specific dynamics and history, contribute that analyst’s subjective “flavor” to the “dialect” of action, affect and verbalizable meanings that will constitute and describe the actualizations and/or enactments of that analysis.

III

In order to further advance and deepen our exploration of the analyst’ silence, I would like to suggest the existence of two dialectical spirals that will define and describe the opportunities and problematic challenges of the analyst’s silence in relation to the enigmatic and emergent potential of the analytic situation and relationship. One spiral is between silence and speech (silence <–> speech); the other is between silence as action or thing and silence as receptive waiting indicating potential space (silence as action or thing <–> silence as potential space). At any given moment, the force and meaning of the analyst’s silence will occupy an ever-changing kaleidoscopic position within these different poles.

As Green (1986) has noted “silence can be experienced differently by each” member of the analytic dyad (p. 19). The patient has the conflicted desire to be in touch with the analyst and to avoid that contact; to be in touch with him or herself (especially the unconscious parts) and to avoid that contact. The same applies to the analyst. As a result, interpretation (i.e., the analyst’s speech) will inevitably have “paradoxical goals, for it must maintain the contact with the analysand while allowing the necessary distance so that this form of contact can lead to insight” (ibid., p. 19). At times, of course, this distance will require “no speech” or silence on the analyst’s part.

For the patient, conditioned by the transference, the analyst’s silence may speak volumes. Thus, Faimberg (1981) reminds us that the patient may “hear” something behind and within the analyst’s silence: “The patient hears that the analyst’s silence is speaking to him. He listens to the analyst’s silence or interpretations and reinterprets them according to the history that contributed to the constitution of his psyche” (p. 24).

For the analyst, silence is an essential component of listening and receptivity. It

coincides with evenly suspended attention … [and] appeals to the unconscious … [by] invoking the representations and affects of repressed infantile sexuality… [It elicits] “the actualization of drive-related representatives, affects, acts and bodily states that will then be pending representation. This silence is a silence of openness to the unexpected, if not the unknown. The point is to let oneself be infused by the patient’s speech and by anything that comes from him. This includes words, speech acts, the voice, affects, bodily sensations, all those attractive, seductive and/or repulsive aspects. Silence allows the analyst to perceive the associative thread amid the flow of speech, to unravel the representations and the affects and retie them differently within constructions that can either be named or not. The analyst’s silence therefore consists of a speech that remains unsaid but whose verbalization is always pending in keeping with its timeliness.

(Sechaud, 2018, p. 91, italics added)

This is the silence of Bion’s (1970) reverie and negative capability, listening without memory or desire: a state of passive, but alert openness and receptivity, a readiness for absorption of unconscious projections from the patient and a “making room for wild thoughts” within oneself (intuition). It is a silence that allows time and space for the possibility and unconscious working of alpha function (Bion 1962) and the transformation of raw existential experience, emotion and somatic sensation into ideational representation that can become integrated into a personally meaningful narrative.

This silence is present even when the analyst is speaking. It is the silence behind the analyst’s words; the silence of what is not being said. It is the intersubjective corollary of and often forerunner for non-neurotic patients of the enlarging and even creation of a psychic space in which thoughts, phantasy and feeling may appear: the interpersonal corollary of Green’s “framing structure” (encadrement).

Perelberg (2017) describes the framing structure and the process of its creation as follows:

Green states that when holding her infant, the mother leaves the impression of her arms on the child, and this constitutes a framing structure that, in her absence, contains the loss of the perception of the maternal object and a negative hallucination of it. … The negative hallucination creates a potential space for the representation and investment of new objects and the conditions in which the activities of thinking and symbolisation can take place.

(p. 51, italics added)

The

negative hallucination of the mother is a pre-condition for Freud’s hallucinatory wish-fulfillment, for images, for phantasy life, and for thinking. It is also an indication of thirdness, as the mother’s absence implicitly poses the question: “Where does she go when she goes away?”

(Perelberg 2017, p. 52)

At its most constructive, then, the silence of the analyst stands in for and/or reinstates the resonance of the process of creation and enlargement of this potential space, which Green (1980) qualified as the “primordial matrix of the cathexis to come” (p. 166).

Once developmentally achieved, each of us maintains this silent zone within ourselves, thereby guaranteeing the possibility of “the crucial experience of solitude in the object’s presence” (Donnet 2009, p. 35).⁹ In a progressive analytic process, “the analysis develops as though the patient had delegated this silent function to the silence of the analyst” (Green 1975, p. 17). But, as noted earlier, this developmental achievement is not always present or secure and it is often the goal and work of the analysis that is needed to establish its functional presence.

Non-neurotic patients are caught between the twin fears of fusional impingement and annihilating abandonment; between the intrusive presence of the object “which leads to delusion (délire) – and the emptiness of negative narcissism which leads to psychic death” (Green 1975, p. 17). Consequently, in borderline situations (situations limités), the analyst’s silence “can be experienced … as the silence of death” (Green 1975, p. 16). When the latter is the case, the threat of death and annihilation must be transformed into more ordinary absence. This transformation not only requires the creation and maintenance of an internal representation of the absent external object, but may also require the internal creation of the potential space within which the object may be framed; that is, the “stage” upon which the internal object and its associated phantasy movements may come to exist.

Freud offers us a theoretical model of how this comes about in his description of the “perceptual identity” in hallucination through which the infant attempts to deal with the stimulus of hunger that follows the first successful feeding experience. This model of the wish for the missing breast that preserves the concept of the breast and is the precursor of thought also requires a silent space within which the breast-object may internally appear.

Freud’s psychoanalytic formulation of what is needed for the creation of thought is dependent upon a double absence: the negative hallucination of the mother’s physical holding, which reappears internally as the framing structure and the image of the object (breast, mother, milk) that was once there to satisfy and is now absent. Hence, Green (1975) writes: “Absence is potential presence, a condition for the possibility not only of transitional objects but also of potential objects which are necessary to the formation of thought” (p. 17).

In order to assist this transformation, the analyst must tread a fine line between speech and silence, presence and absence, mediating between what the patient can tolerate and use at any given moment and what the treatment requires. At some moments, for some patients, for whom too much speech may feel annihilating, the analyst’s silence may offer a much-needed relief of decompression. For others, silence may lead to feelings of abandonment, disintegration and falling away into infinite space. Thus, Green reminds us that: “Language is situated between the cry and the silence. Silence often makes heard the cry of psychic pain and behind the cry the call of silence is like comfort” (Green 1977, p. 205).

Notes

1 All quotations from Sechaud 2018 are the present author’s translations from the French.

2 “Figurability” refers to the psychic capacity to transform a drive derivative or sensory impression into a mental content (idea; representation) that is saturated in meaning and has the potential to be verbally expressed and symbolically linked to other mental contents. (See Levine et al. 2013 for elaboration of Freud’s theory of representation and the implications of unrepresented states).

3 For readers unfamiliar with developments of non-Lacanian contemporary French psychoanalysis, Donnet’s contribution might be seen as the culmination of a movement in analytic formulation from the idea of an objective, one-person psychology analyst “analyzing a patient” to a two-person psychology, in which a working alliance was necessary, to an even more complex formulation of an intersubjective encounter that included transitional space and the consideration of an analytic third.

4 These processes are included in part, for example, by Green (2005) in his concept of the objectalizing function, by the Paris Psychosomatic School (e.g., Aisenstein 2010) in their references to the competent functioning of the pre-conscious and De Masi (2009) in his description of the emotional unconscious.

5 Of course, if this transformation does not occur and the opportunity is not realized, then the analyst’s silence could actually reflect a countertransference-derived hostility or actualization of a rejecting and/or destructive wish.

6 See for example Green (1975), Levine et al. (2013).

7 See Lipton 1977 for a discussion of Freud’s technique vs. so–called “classical” technique.

8 This assertion is analogous to the view that one cannot know whether or to what extent a painful and disruptive event will deserve to be called traumatic until the environmental response is factored in and the future happens (see Levine 1990).

9 “The analyst’s silence sustains the crucial experience of solitude in the object’s presence. But this experience is not necessarily made explicit or interpreted. As with an iceberg, only a small part of the density and complexity of the process appears on the surface. Discourse on the method tends to ignore the silent process of working-through on the intra-psychic level” (Donnet 2009, p. 35).

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