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During a year-and-a-half-long treatment with a child, silences emerged that were difficult to endure and to understand. This paper is about one therapist's struggle to uncover the many meanings of silence, for both the patient and the therapist. Countertransference feelings informed the evolving usage of the therapist's self. The silences were sensed by the therapist as communications and not as a resistance. The clinical material will be viewed from object relations and infant-research perspectives.
Few articles have been written about silence in the child analytic literature. In contrast, the adult literature has embraced the topic since 1916.
Sigmund Freud (1915-1917) thought that an initial silence was due to the patient's wish to be taken care of (“tell me what to do”) (Calogeras 1967 in Solomon 1992). In Freud's 1919 writing, he asks the following question: “What is the origin of the uncanny effect of silence, darkness and solitude?” and some pages later answers: “We can only say that they are actually elements in the production of the infantile anxiety from which the majority of human beings have never become quite free” (Sabbadini 1992, p. 30).
“Sandor perceived silence as a defense against anal drives or a hoarding process, that is, words-feces-gold. The silent patient experiences silence as strength or power” (Soloman 1992). Zeligs (1961), in Sabbadini (1992, p. 33), further elaborates: If “the function of speech is not