Chapter 7

Varieties of silence in the analytic setting

Salman Akhtar

While cognizant of the fact that the categories of silence I am about to propose might neither be completely exclusive of each other nor exhaustive of the phenomena under investigation, I nonetheless find it heuristically as well as technically useful to view silence along the following typology.

Structural silence

Since “structure” merely implies a relatively predictable and recurring set of processes, it is both quizzical and understandable to speak of “structural silence”. It is quizzical because how can something become organised if it is quiet and not adequately mentalised? It is understandable because aspects of mind do exist that are entirely process-oriented and not content-based. An illustration of this is Winnicott’s (1960) concept of “true self”. Denoting the “going-on-being” (Winnicott, 1956) and un-thought psychosomatic continuity of existence, the “true self” is indescribable. It reflects living authentically with a lambent corporeality and unimpeded psychic life (both operating in peaceful unison); indeed, the essence of true self is “incommunicado” (Winnicott, 1963, p. 187, my emphasis).

Another illustration of “structural silence” or silent structures is constituted by the “area of creation” (Balint, 1968). In this realm of psychic experience, there is no external or internal object present. “The subject is on his own and his main concern is to produce something out of himself; this something to be produced may be an object but not necessarily so” (p. 24). Besides artistic creation, mathematics, and philosophy, this mental sphere includes “understanding something or somebody, and last but not least, two highly important phenomena: the early phases of becoming—bodily or mentally—‘ill’, and spontaneous recovery from that ‘illness’” (p. 24). Even when the subject is without an object, he is not entirely alone. He is most probably with “pre-objects”, dim fragments of non-self representation that congeal into objects only after much preconscious work. The “area of creation” appears in the clinical situation, at times, when the patient is silent and pensive. Such a patient might not be running “away” from disturbing mental contents but might be running “towards” the state of having tangible mental content. This type of silence need not be ruptured by an “intervention”; the analyst must wait patiently till the patient “returns” from his reverie with a “solution” to his malady of the moment.

A third example of “structured silence” is constituted by the psychic material under the domain of “primal repression” (Breuer & Freud, 1895). There is little preconscious representation of the material under “primal repression” and the prefix “primal” (as opposed to “primary”) underscores not only the early but also the ubiquitous nature of the phenomenon in human experience. “Primal repression” is associated with the nonverbal period of infancy; the elements under it cannot be verbally recalled but only be relived. In Frank’s (1969) terminology, this is “the unrememberable and the unforgettable” (p. 48) substrate of the human psyche.

Unmentalised silence

We know from Bion (1962a, 1962b) and, more recently, from Fonagy and Target (1997) that it takes the maternal processing of a child’s spontaneous, even though incoherent and “un-thinkable” psychic material to cohere in sustainable and intelligible thoughts. In Bion’s terms, this is turning beta elements into alpha elements, or incomprehensible and vague affect-sensations into formed narratives that can be reflected upon. It is this maternal attitude that ultimately bestows the gift of the ability to think about one’s mental goings-on. In its absence or pronounced limitation—such as in the case of a “dead mother” (Green, 1983)—the child grows up to be an individual who has little to say in response to others’ thoughts and even, as a follow-up, of his own inescapable spontaneity. In clinical situations, we see such individuals interrupt their half-hearted forays into free association with an exasperated “anyway”, “so that’s it”, “I have nothing more to say about this”, followed by a sigh. It is as if they have run out of ideas and are staring—puzzled and clueless—at the abyss of wordlessness. Interventional strategies with such patients falter if their “silence” is regarded as a resistance. It is more productive to gently encourage them to “think” more. The analyst, for instance, might say to such a patient: “Next time, instead of saying that ‘I have nothing more to say about it’, try saying ‘I have nothing more that I know to say about it’”, or “The next time you are about to end what you are saying by sighing and saying ‘anyway’, and then changing the topic, try saying ‘I was about to say anyway but will try to go on and see what more—even if seemingly unrelated to the topic—can come to mind’”. Such “educative” measures convey to the patient that the analyst is not only interested in the un-mined (pun unintended) areas of his mental field but genuinely believes that the patient can develop the ability to look at this realm himself.¹

Defensive silence

This is the most recognised type of silence in terms of clinical psychoanalysis. Such silence might appear spontaneously and is then a response to the emergent unacceptable wishes and fantasies in the patient. It serves to keep in abeyance those drives, drive-directives, and the transference wishes consequent upon them that are felt morally repugnant or shameful by the patient. For instance, a patient talking about his drive to succeed and be famous might suddenly stop talking. Anxiety takes over and his ability to free-associate is transiently compromised. He seems to have lost his train of thought. Gentle encouragement, along with some “defense analysis” (A. Freud, 1936) might result in the patient’s revealing that he wishes to win a Nobel Prize. In turn, such revelation makes it possible to analyse the patient’s motives in this regard but also, and perhaps more important, his transference-based fears of rejection and criticism for his ambition. Seeming to hinder the progress of analysis, the silence of resistance affords the analyst a wonderful opportunity to bring deep and conflicted material to the surface.

Guilt, shame, and fear of retaliation are, however, not the only motivators of silence in the service of resistance. Loving and feeling loved can also appear threatening, especially to schizoid and masochistic patients, and become the subject of mental erasure. Just as the patient begins to feel loved, anxiety rises and drowns the capacity for verbalisation.

Finally, there is the phenomenon of deliberate withholding. Here the patient refuses to share with the analyst something that he knows (e.g., an extramarital affair, cheating in exams) is emotionally significant and can impact upon his treatment. Prevalent among patients with pronounced, even if compensated, narcissistic and sociopathic traits (Kernberg, 1984; Stone, 2009) such withholding can manifest through “silence” but can also exist under the mask of pseudo-cordial verbalisation. However, it should be remembered that relatively “intact” neurotic patients can also consciously withhold information (e.g., the price of a recently purchased house) out of anxiety and transference-based fears of shame, competitiveness, and hostility.

Clinical vignette 1

Rebecca Cohen,² 26-year-old daughter of a Holocaust survivor father, was in analysis with me. The course of early treatment was filled with anxiety-laden fantasies about her father’s experience in the Nazi concentration camp. Dreaded scenarios of ethnic hatred and violence preoccupied Rebecca and this readily spread to the transference. She feared and hated me, regarded me as a Jew-hating Muslim or Arab, and suspected that I supported anti-Israeli violence by Palestinians. Projections of her own trans-generationally given post-traumatic Jew–Nazi split of the self were constantly active in her relatedness with me. One day, I was hated and viciously attacked. Next day, I was deeply feared.

During one session while talking of the Holocaust, she suddenly jumped up from the couch and ran to the corner of the office that was farthest from me, trembling and obviously shaken by something she had just experienced internally. Rebecca stood there crying. I remained silent. Then she found a box of tissues on the desk nearby, cleaned her face, and began to look a bit composed. I did not say anything and waited patiently for things to unfold. Rebecca jumped up, sat on my desk, and asked me if I knew what had happened. I shook my head, telling her that I did not. She then revealed that she had felt that I was going to take out a knife and stab her while she was on the couch and that’s why she had to get away from me. As she was narrating this, I noted that she had become much calmer. I remained quiet. Rebecca went on to say,

“You know, I have never seen your office from this end. It looks so strange … you know, what it looks like … it looks so still. Everything is unmoved, quiet. It is like a dust cover jacket of a best-seller murder mystery. And you know what, sometimes when you read the whole book, you find out that all the clues were already shown in the photograph on the cover of the book. Yes, your office, from this side, looks like a photograph of just that sort, with all the clues intact.”

Now I spoke. I said, “And, I guess I would be the corpse in this murder scene.” Rebecca smiled, stretched her arms, and aiming her clasped hands at me, made a noise indicating that she was shooting me with a gun. I responded by saying

“You know what, a little while ago you thought that I was going to kill you and now that you have taken some distance from that position, you find yourself killing me. Look, this murder and murderer are both parts of your own self and, for the work we have mutually undertaken, it is my hope that we hold on to both these views and see how they are related to each other, where they came from, and what purposes do they serve.”

Rebecca got off the desk, walked back to the couch, and lay down. The session continued in the “usual” way.

Enactive silence

The “deliberate withholding” mentioned above might be a way of avoiding personal shame, anticipated ridicule by the analyst, or behind-the-back gossip or mocking by real or imagined third parties (e.g., the analyst’s colleagues or spouse with whom the analyst is assumed to share secrets). Until the time such motivation governs withholding, the practice falls under what Arlow (1961) has called “silences which serve primarily the function of defense” (p. 49). However, if the aim of deliberate withholding is to mislead the analyst, control him, and render him impotent, then the phenomenon belongs to the category of “silences which serve primarily the function of discharge” (p. 49).

In contemporary terminology, silences of the latter type constitute enactments. By becoming or remaining silent, the patient is putting something into action and, at the same time, pulling the analyst into a reactive or reciprocal response. Such silence may be used to cause a “reinstinctualization of the process of empathy” (ibid., p. 51) in the analyst. It might be a way of teasing and hurting the analyst. Hiding under the cloak of “verbal invisibility”, a tenaciously silent patient might attack the analytic process, freeze its progress, “kill time”, and paralyse the analyst’s “work ego” (Olinick, Poland, Grigg & Granatir, 1973). The activation and discharge of primitive sadomasochism is difficult to miss under such circumstances.

While it is hardly possible to exhaustively list the relational scenarios that are played out through relentless—and, often motionless (with the patient lying absolutely still on the couch)—silences, common “messages” from such patients include: (i) “Please do not try to kill me; I am already dead”, (ii) “I am going to make it impossible for you to do your work; you will feel as worthless as I felt growing up in my family”, (iii) “I am not going to talk no matter how much you want me to; I will make you feel how I felt when my father would become silent for days upon the slightest infraction of rules on my part”, and so on. In other words, enactments in the form of silence can reflect self-protection, important identifications, reversals of traumatic childhood scenarios, “attacks on linking” (Bion, 1958), and destructiveness towards the treatment process.

Instinctual discharge and enactment of identifications (e.g., with silently hostile parents) are, however, not the only factors in the aetiology of such silence. Superego dictates might also contribute to it. Arlow clearly states that:

I do not wish to leave the impression that silence in the service of discharge is related exclusively to gratification of id-impulses. Clinical experiences abound to show that failure, suffering, and provocation in analytic situations may serve the self-punitive demands of the superego, and transference repetition may represent a persistent need to expiate guilt by using silence as a provocation of punishment

(1961, p. 51).

Clinical vignette 2

In the throes of a regressive transference, Jill Schwartz entered my office enraged and waving a finger. Approaching the couch, she said, “I have a lot on my mind today and I want to do all the talking. I don’t want you to speak even a single word!” A little taken aback, I mumbled, “Okay.” Jill shouted, “I said, ‘not one word’ and you have already fucked up this session!” Now sitting on my chair behind her, I was rattled. “Did I do wrong by speaking at all?” I asked myself. As she lay on the couch, angrily silent and stiff, I started to think. Perhaps she is so inconsolable today, so intent upon forcing me into the role of a depriving person, that she found a way to see even the gratification of her desire as its frustration. I was, however, not entirely satisfied with this explanation and therefore decided to wait, and think further. It then occurred to me that maybe she was rightly angered by my saying “Okay”. In my agreeing to let her have omnipotent control over me, I had asserted my will and thus paradoxically deprived her of the omnipotence she seemed to need. I was about to make an interpretation along these lines, when it occurred to me that by sharing this understanding, I would be repeating my mistake: making my autonomous psychic functioning too obvious. As a result, I decided to only say, “I am sorry”, and left the remaining thought unspoken. Jill relaxed and the tension in the room began to lessen. After ten minutes of further silence, she said, “Well, this session has been messed up. I had so many things to say.” After a further pause, she said, “Among the various things on my mind …” and thus the session gradually “started”. By the time we ended, things were going pretty smoothly.

Symbolic silence

The contemporary eclipse of the “drive theory” perspective³ should not make one overlook that what appears as silence might be a displaced, symbolic derivative of other instinctual aims. For instance, silence in obsessional neurotics is often a manifestation of anal erotism (Ferenczi, 1916): mouth replaces the anus and words get equated with faeces under such circumstances. “Retaining words” becomes a vehicle of controlling a mother who insists upon proper toilet habits. Sharpe enlarged the scope of the drive-based aims that could be expressed via silence.

When the ego stabilizes the achievement of body-control and it becomes automatic, the emotions of anger and pleasure which heretofore accompanied bodily discharges must be dealt with in other ways. At the same time as sphincter control over anus and urethra is being established, the child is acquiring the power of speech and so an avenue of “outerance” present from birth becomes of immense importance.

First of all the discharge of feeling tension when this is no longer relieved by physical discharges can take place through speech. The activity of speaking is substituted for the physical activity now restricted at other openings of the body, while words themselves become the very substitutes for the bodily substances.

(1940, p. 157)

Thus, silence can represent an open mouth waiting for the milk of the mother-analyst’s voice, a tightly closed anus refusing to yield faeces for a pleading mother, or a welcoming vagina ready to receive the father-analyst’s “phallic” interpretations. However, such thinking has become sidelined in the current fervour of object relations, intersubjectivity, and an overall pallor of psychoanalytic interest in the body (Paniagua, 2004). Sharpe’s perspective that silence might symbolise other bodily phenomena has lost its audience. Even less recognised is the fact that traffic moves in the opposite direction as well. In other words, other organs can be enlisted to express silence. Eyes are particularly important in this regard. Averting gaze and refusing to look at someone can be deployed as a form of not talking to them; this can have devastating effects upon the one who is thus shut out. A growing child, encountering such “visual silence” might find it hard to sustain self-esteem, and his capacity for object constancy might suffer (Abrams, 1991; Riess, 1978). Even during adulthood, being subject to such relational silence can be very disconcerting (Patsy Turrini, personal communication, February, 2012).

Such dreadful turning-away of the object and the resulting “torture by separation” (Sartre, 1946, p. 8) bring to mind that silence can symbolise death. Wurmser’s (2000) observation that the German word Totschweigen stands for “to kill by silence” is also pertinent here. Wurmser notes that such “soul blindness”—a sustained and profound insensitivity (including visual aversion) to someone’s individuality—can lead to structural disintegration in the recipient. Within the clinical situation, a tenacious silence often transmits a sense of putrefaction and deadness. The patient seems to be “playing possum” and thus avoiding an imagined attack from the analyst while at the same time “killing” the analyst off.

Contemplative silence

A slowing down of perceptual and cognitive traffic as well as a certain “low keyedness” (Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 1975) of affect is essential for fresh insights to emerge from within (Ronningstam, this volume) and/or new information from outside to be metabolised. The associated stoppage of active speech falls under the rubric of “contemplative silence”. The individual, in this state, is involved in a private and subliminal dialogue with his subjectively experienced inner objects (Mahler, Pine & Bergman, 1975; Winnicott, 1963) or turning attention inward to comprehend and catalogue what he has just heard or seen.

The pensive quietude that follows reading poetry, looking at a striking piece of art, and even upon hearing seriously bad national news is an illustration of “contemplative silence”. In the context of our clinical work, such silence appears spontaneously and is followed by a meaningful revelation or enhancement of associations. Or it appears in response to the analyst’s intervention.

Some patients need some “silent time” to mull over, to contend with, to digest the new insight. This will be followed by confirmatory material if the interpretation is correct. It is a much more frequent occurrence, however, to find that patients will react with silence to an incorrect interpretation. In this situation, silence usually indicates the disappointment in not being understood. Usually such silences in response to interpretation are transient. Prolonged silence after an interpretation always means that the interpretation has been incorrect.

(Greenson, 1961, pp. 82–83)

Clearly, the clinical situation is not the sole arena for contemplative silences to emerge. As stated above, appreciation of art and literature is regularly reliant on such quietness of mind. Rapt absorption in pondering over scientific and mathematical problems, as well as seeming oblivion before a writer puts pen to paper, are also instances of contemplative silence.⁴ The “recess” a judge takes before giving his judgement in a court of law is also pertinent in this context.

Nowhere is “contemplative silence” more evident than in the state of mourning.⁵ Withdrawal of cathexis from the external world and the need to shuffle the relational cards involving the lost objects lead to a certain quietness on the bereaved person’s part. Feeling humbled by the awesome power of death, one loses faith—for a moment—in spoken words. Communion with the internal representations of the deceased, and the awareness of one’s own mortality render one wary of platitudes. Attention turns towards the changed reality, and the gaping hole produced by the loss is covered over by silence.

Regenerative silence

Within psychoanalysis, the notion of an ego-replenishing quietude was first introduced by Winnicott (1963). According to him, genuine communication only arises when objects change over from being subjective to being objectively perceived. It is at this point that the two opposites of communication also appear. One is active or reactive not-communicating and the other “simple not-communicating” (p. 183). This is what I have termed “regenerative silence” here. In Winnicott’s words:

Simple not-communicating is like resting. It is a state in its own right, and it passes over into communicating, and reappears as naturally … One should be able to make a positive statement of the healthy use of non-communication in the establishment of feeling real.

(pp. 183–184)

Such not-communicating is seen by Winnicott as restoring the vitality of true self which by its very nature is incommunicado and most worthy of preservation. His notions in this realm have been further developed by Khan (1983a, 1983b). In describing the state of “lying fallow”, Khan declared that this:

is not one of inertia, listless vacancy or idle quietism of soul; nor is it a flight from harassed purposiveness and pragmatic action. Lying fallow is a transitional state of experience, a mode of being that is alerted quietude and receptive wakeful lambent consciousness … We need to be somewhat idle and feel our way out of this benignly languid passive mood. If we are forced out of it, either by our own conscious or the environment, we feel irritable and grumpy.

(pp. 183, 185, italics in the original)

Khan regards the experience of “lying fallow” to be “a nutrient of the ego” (p. 185) and important for the process of personalisation in the individual. Unlike Winnicott, he suggests that while silent inactivity is the most frequent pathway to such experience, it can also be reached by pictorial expression, as through doodling. Moreover, the experience, while deeply personal and private, can be facilitated by the silent companionship of someone—a spouse, friend, or even an unintrusive pet. This is “silence in the service of ego” (Shafii, 1973, p. 431) par excellence.

Blank silence

The consideration of diminished content and velocity of thought in the “lying fallow” state leads to the next logical step of total absence of activity in the mind: no verbally encoded thoughts, no visual images, no affective currents. To be sure, a proposal of this sort causes puzzlement and raises flags of scepticism. One wants to protest. Would not such a state be equivalent to “psychic death” (Guntrip, 1969) or betray a withdrawal from object cathexes that is of psychotic proportions? How could the mind become still to this extent, unless there was a “negative hallucination of thought” (Green, 1993) operative in toto? In other words, the theoretician amongst (and within) us might reluctantly concede that “blank silence” exists but only if he can declare it to be seriously pathological.

Such thinking can certainly explain a certain form of “blank silence”, a “malignant” one, I suppose. However, there might be a benign type of “blank silence” also. Indeed, it was in this latter sense that Van der Heide first proposed the term. He regarded it as representing a blissful merger of the self and object, also seen in close proximity to sleep. Such silence usually occurs in response to a concise and correct transference interpretation.

The patient falls into a silence of many minutes or lasting for the remainder of the session. His position on the couch is relaxed, often the habitual one of sleep; there is no sign of motor activity, speech has vanished and is not attempted. It looks like “time out”. If the analyst succeeds in terminating the silence by urging verbalization (which rarely succeeds), he is told that thoughts were absent and there is no evidence of conscious withholding of thoughts or fantasy. If after a time the silence breaks spontaneously, the spoken thoughts appear distant from the content of the interpretation. Sometimes the patient ends the silence with a remark evidencing awareness of the analyst’s thoughts or momentary affective state.

(1961, p. 86)

Concluding remarks

In this chapter, I have addressed the multifaceted phenomenon of silence and described eight types of silence: (i) structural silence; (ii) silence due to the lack of mentalisation; (iii) silence due to conflict; (iv) silence as enactment; (v) symbolic silence; (vi) contemplative silence; (vii) regenerative silence, and (viii) blank silence. I have placed silence on an equal footing with speaking—especially as these occur in the psychoanalytic setting—by emphasising that both possess the ability to serve similar aims. Both can hide and both can express psychic contents. Both can defend against drive-related pressures and both can help discharge such tensions. Both can convey transference and both can become vehicles of enactment. Both can induce and evoke countertransference feelings. Both can be responded to appropriately or inappropriately by the patient. Both can facilitate or impede the progress of the analytic process. Through all this and more, both silence and verbalisation become integral to our clinical enterprise.

Now, I wish to conclude by noting some questions that have remained unaddressed in this discourse. These include the following. Does gender play a role in the capacity for expressing oneself through silence or in bearing others’ silences? Are there developmental phases where silence, at least in regard to spoken language, is inevitable (e.g., early infancy) or preferred (e.g., old age)? Is silence (around oneself or in parts of oneself) conducive to creative work? Is silence an integral component of that ubiquitous human process called mourning and that elusive character attribute called “dignity”? To be sure, future contributions might provide answers to such questions but we must leave the possibility open for some of those answers to come without the veil of words. We must allow our knowledge to be enriched by a new manuscript of silence.

Notes

1 Talking of the generally alexithymic psychosomatic patients, Baranger and Baranger (2009) speak of interventions that “supply words to describe experiences that never had any. In this type of interpretation, the analyst proceeds per via di porre and not only per via di levare, as Freud (1905) demanded in referring to neurotics” (p. 102).

2 The names given to patients are fictitious.

3 Pine (1988, 1997) continues to remind us, however, that the heuristic corpus of psychoanalysis consists of four psychologies: drive psychology, ego psychology, object relations psychology, and self psychology. They overlap but each adds something new to the understanding of development, psychopathology, and technique.

4 The well-known psychoanalyst-philosopher, Allen Wheelis, told me that he often sits quietly for hours before beginning to write (personal communication, January 2008).

5 Note in this connection the ritual “moment of silence” observed in honour of the deceased. Its purpose is to enforce—temporarily at least— respectful attention upon the memories of the departed one.

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