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It is common knowledge that silence may bring people together. Collective prayers, memorial commemorations, the silent minutes of the Oxford movement, and other rituals, in part, seem to serve this function.
In the analytic situation, speech or intelligible speech at times is abolished. A patient of Mary O'Neil Hawkins (5) resorted to prolonged mumbling when he perceived the analyst as his mother whom, by death, he had lost early in life. During these episodes he assumed that the analyst saw the same pictures he saw, which represented ideas "unassociated with words." However, the experience of a shared, mutual silence occasionally outweighs in importance the ideational content. An analytic patient once was aware of this when she said: "Let us be silent about something else."
In psychoanalysis, passing silences often are caused by transference resistance. Epitomizing the operational importance of transference in psychoanalysis, and transference resistance in relation to speech, Karl Landauer once said that the analysis really does not move until the talkative patient becomes silent, to which he pointedly added: "and the silent patient starts talking."
Departing from our discussion of the chronically silent patient in psychoanalysis, I should like to speak of a "blank silence, " a special form of transient, often recurrent cessation of speech. It is perhaps best defined as a temporary, functional ego regression, defensive in nature and indicative of a considerable alteration of the dominant object relation.
The silence I have in mind is related with orality and most prevalent in the analyses of regressed patients whose symptomatology and transference are dominated by the residues of that stage of