Discussion of Lawrence J. Friedman's Article, From Gradiva to the Death Instinct

The paper by Gertrude Aull and Herbert Strean presents several interesting theoretical and technical questions. Since its purpose is to contribute to the clarification of the effect produced by the analyst's silence, it seems necessary to define what is considered as such, for it is obvious that every analyst remains silent in many situations. In the cases presented by the authors, silence goes from “several sessions” (Cases 5 and 6) to 18 months (Case 3).

I agree with the need to search for a constant improvement in psychoanalytic techniques, but it seems rather difficult to introduce a “therapeutic technique of silence.” Eissler refers to all deviations from the technique as parameters and has formulated several rules to continue calling the technique analytic, the principal rule being that the parameter could be incorporated in an explicit form to the transference to be resolved by interpretation.

The authors seem to have overestimated the effect of silence. Their conclusions attribute a number of changes to silence without taking into sufficient account other factors of the analytic situation which probably influenced the changes. I think, too, it is necessary to point out that in every investigation of psycholanalytic technique great attention must be given to the countertransference phenomenon.

In a paper on “Transference and Counter-Transference” which I presented with Dr. C. Whiting to the Second Pan-American Congress of Psychoanalysis, we said: “The analytic situation formed by a patient in state of regression and an uncommitted observer analyst who intervenes without emphasizing the basic role of transferential interpretation, could be in many occasions the result of an intellectual attitude in the service of counterresistance, hiding several unconscious problems of the analyst. It could be, for example, the effect of an obsessive defense that reinforces a phobic avoidance of the analysand's projective identification or inversely a way of denying intense regr