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It is always fascinating how mundane chatting can suddenly turn to silence in the concert hall before the first note is played, the first chord struck. You need to experience silence in order to shift from one reality to another, from the reality of talking to the reality of music. It works like the frame of a painting, separating and creating two distinct kinds of reality. As many authors in the book Silence and Silencing in Psychoanalysis underline, this silence-frame is a feature that characterizes the psychoanalytic setting.
We still hold in our minds the unthinkable silence of our cities during the lockdown for the Covid-19 pandemic. In a way, when human activities are shut down, what we can hear is not silence but the music of the spheres: the background sound that surrounds us all, while we do not notice it. Winnicott attributed it to the absolutely personal core of the self, the sound of being oneself. It is a pregnant silence, as Donna Orange argues, and it can be identified with “nature itself, not contrasted with language … but as its very underpinning” (p. 9).
In chapter 1 (pp. 7-25), on silence in phenomenology which opens the Cultural part of the book, Orange discusses such a pregnant-natural silence and expresses her “concern about the deadening effects of technical rationality”, a concern which has been “common among phenomenologists” (p. 10). The author then touches on what she calls threatening silences, especially those described by the phenomenological psychiatrist Frantz Fanon in his work on the “silent assumptions [that] shaped the experience of blacks and of those suffering under colonial regimes” (p. 11).
Related to threatening silences, we find trauma-frozen silences. All these and still other silences need to be partly, slowly “unfrozen” in the analytic situation. Partly and slowly because when glaciers melt, emotional floods are at risk.
In chapter 2 (pp. 26-40), Colum Kenny deals with silence as a religious and spiritual “fact of experience”