Silence: Something we Rarely Hear, Which does not Exist

It is quite possible that during analysis both the analyst and the analysand are most deeply in communication when each is listening into the silence of the other. I am interested in silence partly because I work in silence and, accordingly, have taught myself to listen into the silence of my patients and myself in analysis and in psychotherapy. I think it is fair to say that true dialogue occurs not when we are listening to the stories our patients tell us, or their dreams and words, but when we are listening into their silence. Listening into silence seems to me to be a search for meaning and an elemental clue to empathy and associations. Analysts rarely address the topic of silence outside of its clinical use in technique. A clinical example that might be the prototype of this phenomenon would be the dialogue about dreams in which there is so little sound and so much image.

In the book The World of Silence (1953), Max Picard hypothesized that word came from silence and it seems that language evolved from images out of silence. He wrote that when two people are conversing in one another, however, a third is always present: