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To the Editors: Gertrude Aull and Herbert S. Strean have written a provocative paper on “The Analyst's Silence” [The Psychoanalytic Forum, Vol. 2, No. 1]. Like Meyer Zeligs, I question their approach to the question of silence as if it could be studied as an independent, experimental variable. In this way, the writers attempted to place a silent “blackout” on any verbal interpretation or comments for as long as six months at a time.
As an experiment, this approach seems questionable, but when the authors then deny that they are subjecting their patients to an experiment, and imply that their purpose is, rather, a deliberate therapeutic maneuver, I think their case is further weakened. It appears clear from the material presented that the patients counter-reacted in an attempt to adapt in the best way they could to such a rigid and manipulative “therapeutic” (?) maneuver on the part of the therapist. I think we have all experienced surprise at some patients' capacity to tolerate and sometimes even use the analyst's errors or his countertransference to their own therapeutic benefit.
Responding to Ferenczi's admonition that the patient's silence should be met with silence on the part of the analyst, Glover, in his Techniques of Psychoanalysis, said: “To meet silence invariably with silence is to court a sort of silent combat which confirms the obstinate or aggressive patient in his view that analysis is a kind of psychological pugilistic encounter to be settled by the gaining of points.”
That Aull and Strean's patients made in some instances what appeared to be a positive adaptation to this kind of encounter in no way justifies their approach.
Reed Brockbank, M.D.
San Francisco, California