Silence seems to be, at the same time, omnipresent and extremely difficult to grasp. From Zen Buddhism to twentieth-century (post)classical music, silence is central to so many traditions around the globe. From Hamlet to Heidegger, everyone has contemplated it at least once. Nevertheless, who can claim to have understood its meaning and importance, given that it disappears as soon as you try to put it into words? It is not more accessible even when we learn that fMRI scanning shows that (1) brains of people who practice silent meditation work more efficiently (Prochnik, 2010, pp. 13–14); (2) during listening to symphonic music, it is the silent intervals that produce the most intense, positive brain activity (ibid, p. 14); and (3) as many as 45,000 fatal heart attacks per year can be attributed to noise-related cardiovascular strain (Prochnik, 2010, p. 15). How are we supposed to understand this? Lovers cherish silent understanding; true friends can be of help to one another without words; many people cannot achieve concentration without silence. Why is silence this important for humans?
When we first stumbled upon the idea of a book about silence in psychoanalysis, we were instantly sure that there had to be at least a shelf full of such volumes. We have seen and heard silence mentioned as a symbol of psychoanalytic practice so many times that, once we started talking about the silence, it seemed to us it had always been at the core of our professional lives. We were not able, however, to come up with a familiar title in that initial conversation, and, worse still, subsequent literature searches led nowhere. To our utmost surprise, we had to conclude that not a single book of this kind had been published in the last several decades.1
It then turned out that it was different in the history of psychoanalysis, though only for a time. It seems that Theodore Reik, the pioneer of psychoanalytic research of both silence and music, was right when he wrote “we shall take a lonely path, scarcely trod upon, for we shall talk about the silence of the psychoanalyst” (1948, p. 124). In the first half-century of the development of psychoanalysis, silence was quite an obscure topic, uncontested in its particular position at the centre of the analytic attitude. To quote from Reik again: “In psychoanalysis, too, what is spoken is not the important thing. It appears to us more important to recognize what speech conceals and what silence reveals” (ibid., p. 127). As many other traditions recognized before or simultaneously, a voice from the depths, from the unconscious, can hardly be heard, if we do not clear the more superficial layers for it to start appearing.
In the 1950s and 1960s, tides turned, probably because of the appearance of new psychoanalytic paradigms, and silence became a prominent topic. A brief search of PEP-Web leads to papers, panel reports, book reviews. Suddenly, everyone grew talkative about silence, mostly in terms of psychoanalytic technique (resistance and how to overcome it), but for the first time also in terms of silence as a possible precondition for therapeutic growth and maturation.
Since 1980, the number of psychoanalytic papers on silence has steadily risen. We believe that this is a consequence of the proliferation of publications, and not so much of new conceptualizations or research. There seem to have been only a few important papers about silence in recent decades, and there are two basic approaches to it. First, there are case presentations, about patients who are silent for long periods of time, or of different diagnostic categories, going even to the level of pathologizing the phenomenon with expressions like “the silent patient” (Ferber, 2004; Fuller & Crowther, 1998; Hadda, 1991; Leira, 1995). Second, some papers offer connections between psychoanalysis (usually Bion or Lacan) and artistic, mystic, or spiritualistic approaches (like Götzmann, 2011; Leky, 2012). And finally, more and more authors approach silence in the therapeutic space from the intersubjective perspective (Bravesmith, 2012; Knutson & Kristiansen, 2015; Little, 2015).
Opposite to this situation in the world of psychoanalysis, we discovered a plethora of research about silence in many other traditions. It even has a historiography of its own (Corbin, 2018), it is deemed “one of the least understood elements of our lives” (Brox, 2019), and many people publish memoirs of what they have discovered thanks to long periods of silence (see, for instance, LeClaire, 2010; Maitland, 2009). However, silence turns out to be, first of all, a central topic of mysticism, spirituality, and theology (see, for instance, Hanh, 2015). There are possibly more books in this domain than one can read in a lifetime, yet it seems safe to claim without fear of simplification, that silence is a rare, if not unique, factor that can unite all religious traditions: numerous teachers, not to say prophets, from different epochs and regions, ascribe a precious role in their “enlightenment” to silence. It is always a necessary method of self-exploration, and some consider it the cardinal trait of a god, the being, or the non-being.2 Many find its vanishing from contemporary Western world to be a sign of the societal spiritual and ethical decadence, and its focus on material and ephemeral values.
It is almost the same when it comes to the importance of silence in music. Although we may be focused on sound, i.e. tones, during a concert we hear an equal amount of silence before, in-between, and after the tones. This turns silence into a matter of great attention for both composers and performers.3 One need not look for examples further than the despair expressed in the morrendi of Shostakovich's late string quartets, his most intimate compositions,4 or deliberate experiments with protracted silences in the middle of a concert performance by Jim Morrison of “The Doors”. And then there is language and the puzzle of its relationship to silence: are they opposite to one another, necessary for one another, and how are they understood and dealt with by two or more interlocutors?
That is also precisely how this book opens. The first section of this collection consists of five essays that help position psychoanalytic approaches inside a broader cultural and societal context. Precisely because psychoanalysts have long thought and written as if history began with Sigmund Freud, this book provides insight into the centuries, or even millennia, of human curiosity about the phenomenon of silence. The space allotted to this, only one book section, cannot do justice to numerous prolific traditions of mystics, philosophers, poets, and all inquisitive minds, who found silence important, if not central, for their quests.
The second and most extensive section of the book is, and understandably so, devoted to psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis is often ridiculed, in films, novels, and caricatures, for notoriously long silences that can happen in sessions and which are almost impossible to imagine in everyday conversations. Psychoanalysts believe that these silences are necessary and have a specific meaning depending on the phase and moment of “the dialogue of two unconsciouses”. When clients are silent, psychoanalysts try to understand the affective tone and possible meanings of this form of expression, so that “talking cure” sometimes turns into “being-silent-together cure”. Also, those who perform the talking cure are seldom talkative: even if a psychoanalyst were confident that s/he had understood something important about a patient’s inner life, s/he would speak only scarcely and briefly. We hope that the seven chapters of this section provide enough insight into these processes. This is of the utmost importance because, although not always recognized, silence has a central place in psychoanalysis:
Furthermore, we hope to elucidate a need to listen to psychoanalytic silences in two different registers. Beside the perspective of clinical psychoanalysis (and the three types of papers mentioned earlier), the second approach is based on the findings of psychotherapy process research, where silence as one of the elements of psychotherapeutic conversations and its relations with other elements can be studied with various qualitative and quantitative techniques for data analysis. Strangely, this opportunity has never been used thus far, and this book offers unique and primary insights into silence in psychoanalysis obtained by the method of conversation analysis. The overlaps are inspiring, as when, for instance, researchers and clinicians agree that there are different types of silence in psychotherapy. As editors, we also hope that these types are all well described in this book, so that practitioners will find this helpful in everyday work with patients and researchers will find it inspirational for future studies.
Just as psychoanalysis must find its place in the broader context of various approaches to the human condition and to human existence, it also must remain open to the feedback that comes from empirical research. If nothing more, research methodology teaches us that it is impossible to take several steps at a time, which, in our enthusiasm for psychoanalysis, we tend to do, and thus create prematurely closed and overdeveloped systems. Furthermore, research presented in this volume shows where our weaknesses and blind spots are, as well as how to study them in order to become capable of overcoming them.
We cannot, of course, make an objective assessment or prediction of the possible contributions of, and reception to, this book. And, possibly, we cannot hope for much more than to turn the attention of the psychoanalytic community to the phenomenon of silence in the consulting room, and beyond, and thus save silence from the fate of being merely the “empty time” of psychoanalytic treatment.
Notes
1 That is, not in English and German, because we did discover one in French, albeit it consisted mostly of the reprints of classical papers (Nasio, 1998). Also, the collection of German translations of papers from the International Journal of Psychoanalysis was published under the title “Silence” (Junkers, 2007). However, none of the chapter titles included the words “silent” or “silence” with the exception of Elsa Ronningstam’s contribution (also included in this book). The other ones mention that silent episodes happen in psychoanalytic treatments, but they do not focus on this topic. We think that this indicates how deeply the need for a monographic treatment of the topic is felt, but how little was said about.
2 This can give silence an ontological status at a transcendental level, higher than that of natural phenomena.
3 The same is also true of theatre performances, where suspended silence can be the most exciting part of the evening.
4 Probably the most widely known example of this, John Cage’s 4'33", seems to suffer from the plague that has corrupted most contemporary artworks. In essence, they are merely illustrations of societal, philosophical, ideological, or religious principles, with very little artistic creativity to them.