Silence as a Tool for the Analyst

In these reflections I would like to try and rethink the use of silence by the analyst. Once considered an important aspect of analytic technique, it seems to have been steadily relegated to the second rank as a tool of technique: silenced indeed. Obviously, silence is not only a technical element of psychoanalysis: it is principally a constituent of discourse, determining its pauses and interruptions, perhaps acting as the prelude to a resumption, and setting lines of demarcation between one piece of discourse and another. Even in analysis it does not exclusively take the form of an aspect of technique: indeed, it can be a way of expressing a hostile or intimate feeling (the latter perhaps recalling Winnicott's being alone in the presence of another person, 1958), or tranquillity, or absence. Indeed, in those cases I do not think it can be considered as a tool of the analyst in the strict sense, while nevertheless being a form of therapeutic communication. So, in referring here to silence as an analytic tool, intending it as a sort of active withdrawal of the analyst from the discourse, an active withdrawal from the other's questioning, from - as Lacan would say - the verbal exchange. A sort of frustration or, more generally, an active suspension of the relational and affective element linked to the active, communicative exchange: that is from the discourse as a whole, including the non-verbal.

As I have specified already, I do not intend to claim that silence does not contain relational and communicative elements. However, I believe it implies a passive form of communication, a reduced intentionality with respect to the verbal exchange, an economic element of reduction in the relational intensity implied by discourse understood as an active element of communication. I also think that this actively evasive function of silence as a technical element may have a certain kinship with what has in the past been called the analyst's mirror function. As is well known, this