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The “silent analyst” has been an object of caricature and derision for many decades. About 30 years ago, Sandor Abend gave a lecture to the Virginia Psychoanalytic Society about very lengthy psychoanalytic treatments. In describing a patient he had inherited from Jacob Arlow, he mentioned that the patient complained, “You talk even less than Dr. Arlow did!” Dr. Abend astutely explained how he handled the many transference elements in such complaints.
From a different viewpoint, as early as 1937 Sandor Lorand (1937) warned psychoanalysts that very depressed patients needed interaction, and that silence would cause more difficulty in the treatment. With the advent of transference-focused therapy, mentalization-based therapies, intersubjective and self-psychological techniques, stereotyped silence has all but disappeared as a prescribed attitude for the analyst. Sandler (1981) masterfully described patients with character transferences which elicited repeated verbalizations by the analyst, and explained how analysis of the interaction as a participant observer (first described by Sullivan, 1953) was accomplished through the analyst's “free-floating responsiveness” rather than Freud's “free-floating attention.”
Although Sigmund Freud, in his major paper on psychoanalytic technique (1913), advocated neutrality on the part of the analyst, he never specifically said the analyst should not speak. In fact, Freud did a lot of talking with his patients, and is renowned to have “analyzed” at least one young woman he met by chance while hiking in the mountains. It was probably Carl Rogers, in his various depictions of client-oriented psychotherapy, who did more to create the image of a therapist who says nothing, or, at best, just “reflects” what the patient has said. The benefit of this approach, although dubious, was pointed out by I. H. Paul in his interesting book, Letters to Simon (1973). Paul explained that talking too much could interfere with the patient's autonomy and cou