Part III

Introduction to Part III

Researching silence in (therapeutic) conversation

Some philological flea cracking

Most clinical experts are not very familiar with the study of conversation, especially a type of study named “conversation analysis.” Some of the papers in this section use conversation analysis in order to precisely research what function and form different types of silences, e.g. longer and shorter ones, have in the psychoanalytic treatment room. Conversation analysis has deep links to psychoanalytic thinking. In order to make these links visible we have written a longer introduction to this part than to the other two parts. We hope to show that research methods can inform and inspire clinical psychoanalysts in their practices. We start with a short episode in psychoanalytic history which is not well known, but was very influential in producing an unnecessary split between psychoanalysis and conversation analysis.

When Freud turned the attention of his listeners to slips of memory, forgetting of names or words, he pointed out how tiny details of a conversation convey deep and far-reaching meanings. One of his examples was welcoming an audience with the words, “I am happy to say goodbye – err – to welcome you all.” He filled the pages of his most widely read book with many other cases. One of his examples is seldom quoted in English literature because it is difficult to translate. Freud writes about an instance when, in a salon society around the year 1910, the title of a book does not show up in a young lady’s mind. She sees the cover of the book in front of her. However, she cannot manage to read the title. Even the young gentlemen present failed to come up with the right idea (Freud 1916/17, p. 90).

The title of the book is “Ben Hur,” and the point is that the German word “Hure” means whore or prostitute. The translators of the Standard Edition (vol. 6, p. 41) explain in a footnote: “The German words ‘bin Hure’ sound not unlike ‘Ben Hur.’” Freud explains why the young gentlemen failed to come up with the right title. He thinks that their unconscious might have understood the meaning of the young lady’s failure to utter the title: because it might have compromised her. Freud writes (1901, pp. 41–42):

Now, we have to do some philological flea cracking, which will sharpen our eyes for the details of micro-analysis.

The first edition of Freud’s book is from 1901, and the “Ben Hur example” is inserted in a later version. The example under scrutiny comes from Theodor Reik, which is announced by Freud. However, as the ellipsis (…) indicates, Freud does not quote Reik completely, he leaves something out. As we were not able to find an English translation of Reik’s paper, here is the German version followed by our translation:

(Reik, 1920, 209f)

Here is our translation:

We have set in italics those parts of Reik’s text that were omitted in the Standard Edition. However, they are preserved in Reik’s original text (in German) while in the German “Gesammelte Werke” three dots (“…”) indicate the omission. We can see how Freud ignored what Reik clearly mentions, namely that the young men forgot the name “based on their knowledge of the name and the mimic signs.”

Reik described something, mimic signs, which were unconsciously visible for the men besides what was conveyed to them and alarmed them not to utter the title of the book. Reik had assumed something that Ferenczi later called “unconscious communication.” We conclude that psychoanalysis that is interested in unconscious communication should not omit what is audible and visible, and by which such communication is performed. This ignorance refers strongly to small and tiny “sweet little nothings,” as conversation analysts amusingly named it.

Five actions can be observed here, unrolling in a sequential line. First, there is a young lady who makes a slip: she cannot remember the title. Second, there are young men with a related, but second slip: the unconscious of the male party has understood that of the lady – a communication from unconscious to unconscious seems to be enacted, resulting in the inhibition of the male’s utterance of the correct book title. Third, there is an observer (Reik) who presents us with the story as a document of something observable, mimic signs. Fourth, there is Freud, extinguishing what was center stage for Reik in favor of a theory of unconscious communication. Fifth, we conclude, in order to understand “unconscious communication” of the type discussed here, one must not ignore observables.

Let us stop our reasoning here for a moment and take up another thread. In psychoanalytic methodology, there is a long dispute between hermeneutics and so-called positivism or empiricism. In a nutshell, hermeneutics (which has a very long tradition) prefers to “interpret,” and proclaims that the central psychoanalytic operation is “understanding.” Empiricists, on the other side, draw on the methodology of physics and other hard sciences. They want to prove things, in particular the relationship between an independent and a dependent variable, between an “intervention” and an “effect” caused by the intervention.1 Let us now pay attention to the self-description of the hermeneutic operation in the “Ben Hur” example: If the young men had “understood” why the lady’s mind was blocked, they might have uttered a helpful remark about the objectionableness of the book title and then delivered the title. This conscious act is the traditional hermeneutic meaning of the verb “to understand” (Detel, 2011).

In Freud’s description, what happened was that the young men’s unconscious “understood”! We can learn that if this type of “understanding” were applied in a psychoanalytic session, it could lead to a stalemate. However, it was Reik, in his original case presentation, who revealed the title to the young lady, who was in analysis with him, and he insists that it was this information that opened the path for further analysis the results of which he then published.

The operation of “understanding” is more complex and best described by creating a series: psychoanalysts can learn that their type of “understanding” is an “understanding of understanding” (Detel, 2011). In every single act of understanding, this understanding can understand itself, an activity which requires a higher level of (self-)observation. Understanding evolves to understanding-understanding, and on higher levels in a recursive fashion. Applying the concept onto itself establishes a transient higher-order logic, which makes understanding translucent or transparent. It is as if, for a moment, we could look through the operation into its core procedure.

Observing “observables” deepens the understanding of understanding

What we have is an insight into one of the ways Freud conceptualized the process of making the unconscious conscious. There must be something like an event, something observable. The observable is indispensable. It serves as the empirical basis for conclusions, interpretations, and further theorizing. The process becomes transparent if and only if there is something that can be observed, and it changes by the process of understanding the “understanding” of “understanding.”

This is not the only example of this kind in Freud's writings. There are many others in his case presentations, like the “Rat Man” or Studies on Hysteria. However, what Freud added is a new way of understanding what can be observed. Freud observed what a cultural tradition, even a scientific tradition, ignored. A slip is such an example, telling jokes is another, observing the details of dream-telling a third, and paying close attention to symptoms, the next. Freud started by scrutinizing the surface without interest to step behind the surface (Krejci, 2009; Levy & Inderbitzin, 1990; Paniagua, 1991; Poland, 1992; Smith, 1993). It is the analyst’s theory (Spence, 1993) that makes steps behind the surface. If the surface-observables are addressed without criticism or diagnostic devaluation, then, Spence observed, a patient by him/herself will open up deeper dimensions of experience – and they show up on a new surface. Freud’s early examples give hints of how the deep trench between the methodologies might be bridged. An unconscious that could not be observed would seduce every thinker into wild speculations; a methodology that would not apply its operations to itself could be accused of simplification. A science without some data would lose any recognition.

We are now prepared to understand how a close appreciation of surface in psychoanalysis coincides with that of conversation analysis. Conversation analysts persistently insist that it is not “language,” produced in the philosopher's armchair, that should be studied, but how people really speak. Another shift from grammatical competence to “doing things with words” (Austin, 1962; Brown, 1958) which was accompanied by studying situated communicative events instead of painting the “big picture” of a whole language. Language was discovered to be a living system, used and changed by living people who create words and phrases and songs, rhythms, and rhymes, which could not be predicted. This “pragmatic turn” (Lepper, 2009) was welcomed in psychoanalysis. Freud had always seen treatment rooms as delivery rooms for all theory, and he maintained that nothing is going on there but “an exchange of words.” This often-cited phrase was directed against the assumption of telepathic influence or even magnetism – not only words, and this did not mean that Freud in general would have excluded mimic, voice and gesture or the movement of hands and arms. Think of how he observed Dora’s purse, which she permanently opened and closed. This “exchange of words including mimics, etc.” he named “conversation.” “One more thing before you start. What you tell me must differ in one respect from an ordinary conversation” (Freud, 1913, p. 134). (In German, he uses the word “Konversation” here, not “Gespräch” nor “Dialog”).

In this way, in his paper on “lay analysis” he lets the anonymous listener know about the basic rule. He adds that the therapeutic conversation is different from ordinary conversation. However, it is conversation.

Many researchers have understood that social life is so deeply based on conversation and its various forms that there would be no social life without conversations. Harvey Sacks, the founder of “Conversation Analysis” (CA), quoted Freud often, thus demonstrating a consensual level of understanding (Sacks & Jefferson, 1992/1995). Another close connection between psychoanalysis and CA was delivered by the work of Gail Jefferson, published under the title Repairing the Broken Surface (2017). Jefferson is remembered as one of the most sensitive listeners in the history of social sciences: she could make the shadow of an utterance hearable and, thus, convince others that there were more levels of meaning observable in a conversation than was detectable by merely “applying” theory to the data. No wonder – her parents were psychoanalysts, Bess and Isador Zifferstein.

In the same fashion as Freud, who observed unconscious meaning where others overlooked what they saw and saw nothing, Jefferson could hear, as if she were a musician, the delicate subtleties of withdrawals, of list colligations, in the poetics of ordinary talk (Jefferson, 1996), which was her name for slips and many other topics.

What is it that Conversation Analysts do?

CA researchers believe that social life is structured by the details of linguistics, of speaking and understanding, of influential or failing talk, of the quarrels of complex or more simple conversations. This massive amount of knowledge will be referred to here partly in order to make some overlooked details of therapeutic conversations observable.

The most time-consuming aspect of the work of CA researchers is transcription: beginners need one hour to transcribe one minute precisely. After some practice, things go faster.

What follows is a list of diacritical signs used internationally. They serve the purpose of making observable what is mostly overheard: how people interrupt each other; how they pause or accelerate speech; how failures get corrected, and by whom; whose invitations are accepted or refused. In order to make the social connection of two speakers viewable, it is relevant to analyze the sequence of speech. If you answer a question, do it within 0.8 seconds – otherwise, trouble is likely to come. However, if one does not respond within this small time interval, what does one do? One responds with an explanation for this delay or an excuse: “wait a minute,” prefaced very often by utterances like “oh, I do not have the word at hand.” All these details are considered to be of utmost importance for the organization of the social encounter.

List of transcription symbols (diacritical signs)

Reading transcripts requires some practice, just like reading statistical tables or diagrams. However, the best comparison is to reading a musical score.

Transcription symbols

There is an extended debate about transcription rules (Bolden, 2015; Bucholtz, 2000; Hepburn, 2004; Hepburn & Bolden, 2013; Ochs, 2010) and practices. In this book, we use the simplified version of Jeffersonian transcription rules (Jefferson, 2004, p. 151; Muntigl & Horvath, 2016).

Pauses and silences – an overview

The contributions in this section show how CA researchers analyze pauses and silences.

This section opens a further view on silence, a view which is challenging for most clinically working psychoanalysts and psychotherapist who are not well acquainted with psychotherapeutic process research. However, one will quickly understand that this approach touches the central area of a clinician’s daily work – although in an unfamiliar fashion.

Researchers and clinicians converge in viewing conversation as “the” central element of therapeutic action (Orange, Atwood, & Stolorow, 2015). The psychoanalytic tradition highlighted, in particular, “interpretation” as the unparalleled contribution of the analyst, and today we learned that there is more, much more. Creating an atmosphere of calmness and security, of listening to listening (Faimberg, 1996), enabling emotional resonance (Alvim, 2015; Hamburger, 2015; Watson & Greenberg, 2009), having a patient’s mind in mind and letting the patient participate in this, is better achieved nonverbally. For instance, by a therapist’s way of shaking hands, responding to a patient’s gaze, mutually respecting each other’s “face” while uttering a continuer-token and sometimes take a stance (Niemela, 2011), posing questions which indicate genuine interest, avoiding all kinds of blaming, remaining aloof while speaking words that touch (Quinodoz, 2003), and sometimes finding a humorous balance of respectless respect. Experienced clinicians develop some pride in learning these special abilities and competencies “beyond interpretation”; it is a contribution to personal growth and an increase of professional skills (Orlinsky & Ronnestad, 2005). We speak, and this is more than an “exchange of words” because a special kind of relationship is established by “something more” (Bruschweiler-Stern et al. 2010). This is the origin of all kinds of intersubjectivity and its theories. Intersubjectivity is done by talking plus glancing plus voice-modulation plus gesture plus … plus …

And also – by silence. We realize what a tremendously important element of talk and interaction silence is. It is not the patient who is silent; silence is created by both participants, in therapy as well as in everyday situations. Can silence be studied by methods used in psychotherapy process research? The answer is an unequivocal “Yes” as the contributions in this segment will show.

Heidi Levitt, a well-known psychotherapy researcher, has studied pauses longer than 3 seconds in psychotherapeutic dialogues. What she shows is that pauses can be classified on a scale from obstructive to thoughtful; the classification, then, is based on what happens before and after the pause, by context. A high number of obstructive pauses can be used to predict a negative outcome of therapy, a high number of contemplative pauses serves as a predictor of a positive outcome. Levitt’s study is done with methodological rigor, which makes her results very convincing. Her results fit well into an overarching concept of silence as a threat or as deepening intersubjectivity. We come to understand better what contextual features this distinction is based on.

Buchholz studies pauses shorter than 3 seconds. Most often, they can be observed after slips. But not after all slips. Buchholz identifies that a specific pause length of 1.2 to 1.4 seconds after a slip is relevant for the relationship. His theory proposes to understand these pauses as composed from 0.6 seconds in which the speaker imagines how the slip might be heard in the ears of the listener and another 0.6 seconds in which the speaker projects a new start of speaking. If slips are evaluated as irrelevant for the ongoing relationship, pauses are much shorter. Characteristically, slips by therapists consume more pause-time. The theory proposed is that such slips have the potential to threaten the whole endeavor of continuing analysis. A scheme is developed for how these ruptures are repaired.

Florian Dreyer and Michael M. Franzen study pauses longer than 30 seconds. They show that what is said before those pauses has a typical structure of uncertainty markers and other conversational elements. If the following pause, then, is interrupted and the pause itself is made a salient element of conversation, thinking-while-pausing can be transformed into conversational objects. Joint attention, the base of all cooperation, emerges again, and pause and its thought content can be made to restart the therapeutic talk-in-interaction, which results in creating and sharing an image, a metaphor, or a scenario, for what was going on during the long pause. The schematic analysis is based on 53 examples of “long pauses.”

Anna Vatanen, a linguist from Finland, starts her study of everyday interactional pauses with a new question: What is at stake? And how do participants shift from speaking to pause and vice versa? Her material comes from video-recordings. She discovers that participants do something during pauses; they change their position, look to a common point on a table or somewhere else. In short, a pause is in close connection to the situation and its environment, and is not just a mental or psychological phenomenon. To infer the meaning of a pause is a complex study – done by the interactants themselves. Her distinction between pause, gap, and lapse is useful for better understanding that in continuing the conversation after lapses means to take up nobody’s responsibility and make it agentively one’s own. She observes the rare event where, after a lapse, both participants begin to talk at precisely the same moment, which requires a “sharedness in orientation.” Overall, she has under her conversation analytic microscope 130 lapses shorter than 2 seconds.

A final study presented here by Buchholz and his linguistic co-workers from the Freiburg Institute of Advanced Studies (FRIAS) focuses on another phenomenon: while we talk, it is always the case that many, many things remain unspoken. The simple fact of conversation silences them. Conversation is a selection. This was the Freudian starting point for inventing the “basic rule”: to tell everything that comes to mind. However, it is well known that this task cannot be fulfilled. What can be studied is what Harvey Sacks named “noticeable absence” – if you are greeted and do not respond, this absence of an expectable response is noticed. The material studied here is a video-recording of a couple in trouble looking for therapeutic help. A 10-minute segment is analyzed, and it is shown how both participants omit essential conversational requirements. This can be realized by scientific observers who, at the same time, observe what the participants do not. The study uses various theoretical approaches that became necessary as the phenomena under study could not be understood with one theoretical frame of reference only. However, to our knowledge, it is the first empirically transcribed and video-analyzed interactional sequence of what clinicians would call a “collusion” (Dicks, 1967).

All the conversation analytic studies presented here can conclusively show how rich such situations are. One could even say that they unfold an overwhelming richness in “information” – even if nothing is said. It is worth studying them in detail because only then do we learn how conversation is done, how conversation analysis is done and, for both, for what purpose. To answer the “how-something-is-done” points to the conversational “practices” in use; the next step is the analysis of conversational “functions.” The other option is “sequentiality” – the description of how a sequential order between participants is established (e.g. an answer cannot be given at a first position, it must follow a question). Only after the analyses of sequentiality, practices, and functions are conducted with a sharp eye for details and the richness of “information,” can we try to add an answer to the question of motivation.

We hope that these papers will help psychoanalysis develop a new interest in how strongly social human life is (Kirsch & Buchholz, 2020). It seems highly relevant that CA can contribute to psychoanalysis through its emphasis on listening to the surface and diving deep into the surface, which should be the required beginning of every interpretative process in psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysts can learn from CA not to look “behind” language before they have taken a careful look “onto” the conversation. Many hidden aspects can be discovered there, which would improve the understanding of clinical material, make analytic interpretations more relevant, and treatments more effective.

Note

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