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Language is situated between the cry and the silence. Silence often makes heard the cry of psychic pain and behind the cry the call of silence is like comfort.
If psychoanalysis is primarily concerned with the attribution of meaning to our patients’ communications, and if we believe silences to be meaningful, then one of our functions as psychoanalysts is to understand the meanings of our patient's silences: learning about their inner worlds involves listening to their silences, not just to their words. Such listening is not a simple operation, as silence often makes others (and psychoanalysts are no exception) feel anxious. As soon as this happens—and until we become aware that it has, and of why—our analytic faculties are impaired: our efforts are diverted away from our normal capacity to listen in a state of free-floating attention and, before we realize it, we might have become bored and sleepy, or provided inappropriate responses, such as a retaliatory silence or a rushed interpretation.
Silence is often considered to be just a form of resistance to following the fundamental rule of psychoanalysis. In early psychoanalytic theory, as Arlow (1961) reminds us, “silence was resistance carried to the nth degree, since it ran counter to the direction of the therapeutic effort”. But then, of course, in early clinical theory also the transference and the countertransference were just forms of resistance to be overcome. We now know these views to be inadequate to understand what happens in our consulting rooms.