Author's Response

The comments to our paper range from interested and qualified acceptance with constructive suggestions to scornful admonition with the provocative battlecry of “Countertransference!” Appropriately, a great deal of concern is devoted to the merits as well as the potential dangers of our use of prolonged silence: Miss Joseph and Dr. Zeligs offer much uncomplimentary conjecture concerning our motives while Dr. Infante and Dr. Koch address themselves to the implications of our results and conclusions.

As we stated in our text, we do not wish to propose or debate the superiority or even the advisability of prolonged silence over any other therapeutic technique. The patients we described were not subjected to an experiment; they were among some of our clientele whose patterns of resistance and transference merited, in our estimation, the analyst's sustained verbal restraint at certain points in prolonged analytic treatment.

In the course of our research into the metapsychology of psychoanalytic intervention, we have long been impressed by the frequently salutary and by no means transitory effects of prolonged silence; subsequently, we became interested in subjecting such cases to a more systematic analysis.

We concur with Dr. Koch that the analyst's silence is not an independent experimental variable in the strict sense of experimental psychology. It might have been more appropriately termed a “dimension” of the therapeutic situation. We also agree with Dr. Infante that additional determinants, inside or outside of the analytic situation, may very well have contributed to the changes we have ascribed to the analyst's silence.

If one adheres rigidly to the original analytic model and firmly contends that the essence of the patient's recovery resides in the assimilation and integration of the correct interpretations of the analyst, that any departure from the interpretive injunction is at best a parameter and at worst an acting out of countertransference, then our therapeutic b