Part I

Introduction to Part I

When a patient is silent, we do not think about the nature of the phenomenon of silence. Preoccupied with the psychological meaning of that person’s silence at that specific moment, we tend to overlook the fundamental questions about it. Silence, for instance, certainly exists in nature, but is it a natural phenomenon? Is silence in nature a mere absence of sound or a phenomenon with foundation and purpose of its own? Is it integral to beauty and communication? Should it be a part of our value system? These questions transcend the domains of psychology and psychoanalysis, but they are integral to many individuals and traditions in theology, philosophy, aesthetics, or linguistics. This book opens with essays about these fundamental questions related to silence as human experience and as a (super)natural phenomenon.

In the first chapter, Donna Orange utilizes her double identity of a philosopher and a psychoanalyst to review various phenomenological approaches to silence (“pregnant silence,” “threatening silence,” “trauma-frozen silence,” and “silence as complicity”) mostly dwelling on Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. She also connects her intense sense of social responsibility with her profound clinical experience and shows that silence can also be full of violence, traumatizing, especially when it becomes active silencing. There is, however, also hope in the form of “unfrozen silence” and of personal statements like “no one in our generation ever beat their children.”

Colum Kenny then enriches this volume by a silence-walk through the history of religions from Egypt and ancient Greek culture to Christianity, balanced by reporting on silence in India and other Eastern traditions, as well as in Judaism and Buddhism. Kenny masterfully weaves the story about facets of all these traditions that claim one and the same thing—“God is silence.” He also sets the experience of deep silence in meditation in relation to religious experience—and separates one from the other in order to open this experience for people who do not want to join any kind of religious group thinking.

A prominent linguist, Silvia Bonacchi from Warsaw, delivers an insight into how silence and silencing are understood in her field. The linguistic approach has been to set silence in relation to speech, and silence has been viewed as the absence of speech. Bonacchi only refers to these starting points in order to step over to relevant contemporary authors who have written about the rhetoric of silence. She describes the role and function of silencing with distinctions like endo- and exophasia, which are sometimes followed by esophasia; sometimes we use words for thinking, sometimes for speaking, and sometimes both modes are responded to by respecting the deep need for silence. Sometimes we regain our sense of being within a conversational flow from which we emerge with better cognitive and emotional elaboration. This is an important dimension of therapeutic talk. Interestingly, this same dimension is found in the conversation analytic study by Dreyer and Franzen (Chapter 15). Silence is endowed with a quality to restore human resonance, as Bonacchi describes with reference to many psychoanalytic authors, such as Michael Balint. She also gives rich hints as to the communicative power of the silencing process.

Helga de la Motte-Haber’s chapter graces this volume with an extremely knowledgeable contribution about silence in music. She starts by considering whether to speak of silence in music could be thought of as a joke. Along the way, we learn that it is not, that it is more a paradox, a paradox of humanity, which she spells out with great precision. As music has deep origins in religious rituals of all kinds, it is no wonder that this dimension is again touched upon. De la Motte-Haber analyses the role of silence in the creations of many composers, from Händel, Haydn, and Mozart, to Debussy and Ravel, to Xenakis, Nono, Feldman, and John Cage.

When Patrick Shen, a prominent film-maker and author of In pursuit of Silence, quotes the words of the ancient wise man Chuang Tzu, who wishes to talk to a man who has forgotten all words, he illuminates the same paradox that was tackled in de la Motte-Haber’s chapter. To talk to someone who has lost all words seems impossible, but we are led to understand that in studying silence sometimes talking is the more serious problem. Shen gives a critique of a culture which has lost a deeper sense of how this paradox can be balanced. Culture, in this view, is a human achievement to teach its members how to handle times of talk and to profoundly value times of silence. Losing touch with this issue equals losing depth. And this sounds like a very precise description of contemporary Western culture, where Shen hopes “we may devise methods to restore and protect that silence for future generations.”

We believe that the position and role of silence in psychoanalysis cannot be fully grasped without being contextualized by the five essays in the first part and hope that the direct link will be obvious to readers too.