Nonverbal Communication In The Clinic With Borderline Patients

FOR SOME TIME I HAVE believed that nonverbal communication is as important for the evolution of the psychoanalytic process as the patient's verbalized free associations. Because we have focused most of our attention on the spoken language of our analysands in order to work out its latent meaning, we may have neglected to observe nonverbal language more closely, thus preventing us from discovering the rich source of unconscious fantasies contained in their silence, gestures, movements, and facial expressions.

It has been said that silence can embrace an enormous spectrum of different meanings: resentment, rage, shyness, panic, sadness, anxiety, emptiness, boredom, indifference, frustration, arrogance, etc. However, in general it has been considered as a resistance, impeding the psychoanalytic process. The so-called silent patients very often cause irritation in many analysts, who then actively try to make them speak at all costs, so that the analysis might be—according to them—truly productive. However, silence is not always obstructing, cold, hostile, and ominous; it can also be warm, kind, fruitful, and elaborative. Silence, along with gestures and movements, are all specific modes of object relations through which patients try to transmit messages that they are unable to formulate in the spoken language. Racker (1952) pointed out that music is a succession of sounds and silences. Bion (1974) spoke of "fruitful silences" and silences that are worthless "mathematically"; in other words, they are equivalent to "zero." But there are occasions when that "zero" is placed between two "1s, " and it then becomes 101. Similarly, certain silences convert the sounds preceding and following them into valuable communications. For Greenson (1961), there exists between silence and the spoken word a range of sounds, cries, whispers, laughs, groans, etc., full of emotional content.