You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
Some Of The Most Moving emotional moments in life are experienced in silence: joy, enlightenment, tranquility, and the blissful feeling of being in love, to name a few. Along a similar line, some of life's other poignant moments are experienced in a different kind of silence: grief, loneliness, and despair. Silence can communicate yes or it can mean no. It can say everything or reveal nothing.
Silence in the analytic space has received its own worthy measure of investigation. In the analytic hour, silence takes on many different shades and tones. It may mean many different things for each patient and, in turn, for each analyst. It can encompass layers of thoughts and affects. As Freud (1915) concluded, it can serve as resistance to transference thoughts or as resistance to remembering and even repeating. Silence in the analytic space may also be an unconscious reenactment of a historical event, or a projective identification. It can serve as communication for needed space or an invitation for greater compassion. Silence in psychoanalysis has been thought to create a closed circle in treatment (Zeligs, 1961). It has also been emphasized as a response to object loss or as an acting out. There are those, such as Nacht (1964), who view silence as a reexperience of the perfect and total union at the preobject phase of development, while there are those such as Greenson (1961), who view silence as an empowering sense of a patient's means for retaining integrity. Silence has also been suggested to be the process toward verbalization and the securing of insight (Lowenstein, 1956). As Jacob Arlow (1961) so elegantly said, silence in treatment is different from any other kinds of silences. In silence, there lie psychic riches, as the case below reveals.