The Psychological Meaning of Silence

The following remarks take an individual question of analytic technique as a point of departure, but strike toward another goal. One must be forbearing with me if I here avoid discussing a technical problem, and forgive me if I nevertheless of necessity touch upon it.

In one session, which was characterized by heightened resistance, and which we will go into further later, a patient explained bitterly that analysis itself was “an impossible situation.” Honesty would compel us to admit that, in the light of all social convention, he was right. It is hardly possible to tell a stranger the most intimate facts of one's own life which one has heretofore carefully kept secret, to communicate to him thoughts and feelings which one has scarcely dared to admit to oneself. We also know what increases the difficulty of the situation even more: the acts of communication themselves must become the object of communication and expression. Let us take the most banal examples: the man who is supposed in analysis to confess the hostile and disrespectful thoughts against the doctor which he observes in himself, the woman who is supposed to tell the analyst of raw sexual desires and phantasies of which he is the object. You will admit that these are unusual problems to overcome. The attempt to convince the sick person in a rational way that it is just this process of making possible what seems impossible to him—which is most essential and effective in the analytic process—has little prospect of success in the face of the emotional opposition. It would