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This paper was the introduction to a panel given at the mid-winter meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in December 1958.
The patient in analysis is constantly under the sway of two opposing forces: one moves him to communicate the data relevant to his neurosis while the other compels him to resist doing so. During any given moment of the analytic process, one of these forces may have greater operational relevance,
but it is extremely rare that one or the other force is at work alone. While outside the analytic situation speech is only one of the ways the patient expresses his object relations, in analysis he is expected to translate all facets of his past and present object relations into speech; thus some aspects of his object relations will inevitably find expression in silence during the analytic process. The author illustrates this with the case of a discouraged male patient whose silence was not only a resistance but, as an expression of reluctance to express hostile and critical thoughts about the analyst, it was also a repetition in the transference of his readiness to relinquish competition with his father in favor of passivity and illness.