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I would like to begin by making a distinction: to contrast silence not with speech, as is often done, but with quiet. Silence, I will assert, is the absence of speaking that psychoanalysis only understands by reference to issues of technique. Quiet, I will hold, is a more expansive term when thought of psychoanalytically, associated with lived experience in a relationship between patient and analyst. Quiet is an experience that I will refer to as embedded in a practice of psychoanalysis. A practice differs from a technique in that it is an engagement in the interaction that takes prominence over the application of a method. I should add at the outset that these terms, silence and quiet, have largely been used interchangeably in the psychoanalytic literature, so my separating them out is in part intended to illustrate the varieties of experiences of the silent and quiet analytic pair.
To speak of silence is to immediately speak of issues of technique (e.g., Arlow, 1961; Calogeras, 1967). The silence of the analyst has been considered a technical parameter of the analytic approach; the silence of the patient, a technical issue to be addressed by any number of interventions. I would assert that silence in the psychoanalytic setup can only be thought of as the absence of speech, given the original parameters of the talking cure. Silence is muteness, a refusal to speak when expected. This absence of sound is the condition that has conventionally been understood either to inhibit or facilitate the psychoanalytic process, depending upon whether it is performed by patient or by analyst. Wedded in this way to speech, silence is inseparable from considerations of method and methodology. It is thus bound to matters of control, science, and the rule-bound reproduction of a method-the psychoanalytic method.
Interpersonally, silence in the psychoanalytic setup is associated with terms such as withdrawal and withholding, when thought of from the perspective of technique. The patient