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My instructor at the analytic institute where I did my training once caught my attention with an impromptu comment on silence. He noted that there were different kinds of silence. There was the silence of the uninvolved, the silence of the daydreamer, the silence of consent, and the participatory silence of the attentive listener. Therefore, one had to differentiate among them.
I found myself associating to this incident while reading Joyce Ann Slochower's Holding and Psychoanalysis, A Relational Perspective. For while the book has many strengths—its logical construction, its clear presentation, its balance between theory and illustrative clinical examples-I was perhaps most impressed by the careful way in which Ms. Slochower drew distinctions and differentiated among her cases. Different diagnoses, in turn, necessitated differing clinical approaches, which the author delineated with great clarity. Ms. Slochower also followed up the consequences of her theoretical positions by comparing and contrasting them with other theoretical stances in a most illuminating way.
One of a series of recent volumes about the relational stance in psychoanalysis, the book begins with a definition of holding. Holding is that part of working with patients which is the opposite of our general approach. While we are used to interpreting, for example, and actively pursuing the elucidation of meaning to the patient, holding refers to those areas where the analyst is rather inactive. The goal is not explanation, but the deliberate avoidance of intruding on the patient with the therapist's “otherness.” That is (building on the maternal metaphor developed by Winnicott), the therapist, while knowing and feeling many possible responses to the patient, nevertheless does not express “disjunctive subjectivity.” Thus, during a holding period, the therapist does not challenge the patient's subjective-only knowledge of the therapist. Rather, in an attunement reminiscent of the mother-child dyad, the the