Silence: Now More than Ever

It is often the first question someone asks, when considering analytic work: Will you talk to me? Or, how active are you? Or, I've heard that analysts are pretty quiet: do you talk much? From the very beginning of many treatments, the question of the analyst's silence is at center stage. The question carries many embedded issues, like: How much contact will we have? Will you be with me or too separate from me? Will I be alone here as I expose myself? Are you too Freudian, meaning, are you the stereotypically detached, distant, removed, unaffected analyst?

The question “Will you talk to me?” is clear, stark, and direct, and, yet, it is misleading. It is incomplete, just as the topic of “silence” itself is incomplete. While it is true that every patient-every person in every relationship-wants someone who will talk to him or her, they also, perhaps even more, want someone who will truly listen to them, hear them, understand them, really get them and know who they are. What patients say they want is someone who will speak to them, but what they want even more, what they really want, is a relationship where they feel heard and understood. They can't ask directly whether the analyst is available for such a relationship. Often they don't realize that that is what they want, or the desire for relationship is too conflicted to acknowledge. All this is too difficult to articulate at the beginning of a potential treatment, so the patient asks a related and easier-to-ask substitute question: will the analyst speak to them? It is up to the analyst to understand that, in this question, the patient is also asking whether the analyst will listen to them and how he will respond to what he hears.

To hear someone, the analyst must listen. To listen, the analyst must be quiet. Speech and silence are two sides of the same coin. This coin is the nature and form of an analyst's participation and expression of contact in an analytic treatment. If you listen to Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald