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I feel honoured to comment on such rich and thought-provoking material from a session with a seven-year-old girl, Rebecca, with selective mutism. It might feel ironic for a ‘talking cure’, but silence in the therapy room may be polymorphous, meaningful,
productive and even valuable (Akhtar, 2013). Whenever I think of selective mutism, however, a well-known Homeric phrase comes to my mind, words uttered by Zeus, father of the gods, when his daughter Athena accused him of having abandoned Ulysses: “My child, what words have escaped the fence of your teeth?” (Homer, 1992, The Odyssey, Rhapsody A:64). Imagine my surprise when I read that Rebecca stopped talking to her mother after a trip to the dentist! Did she get scared that the ‘fence of her teeth’ would be intruded upon? That the presumably very angry words she withholds would ‘escape’ from her, and her aggression would be out in the open, destroying everything, her abandoning parents and omnipotent self included?
The silence of patients with selective mutism is highly overdetermined: unconscious meaning is attached to it. The act of speaking becomes dangerous, as the child equates it to an act of aggression. Silence, then, becomes the child’s way of defending against the forbidden impulse. At the same time, however, silence can become very hostile, as it is used as a punishment and a weapon against the parents who want their child to speak (Yanof, 1996). It seems that Rebecca’s mother has fallen victim to her daughter’s ‘silent’ aggression: she tries hard to organise ways for Rebecca to communicate, which Rebecca quite sadistically ignores. On the other hand, the mother seems unconsciously to feel her daughter’s deeply rooted aggression toward her: she ‘walks on eggshells’ around her, while she feels personally hurt and rejected.
So what about the therapist? ‘How can such silence be therapeutically approached? It risks being overrun by our verbiage, just as its meanings may be subtly consumed by our anxious effort