Silence and Silencing in Psychoanalysis

Cultural, Clinical, and Research Perspectives

Aleksandar Dimitrijević, Michael B. Buchholz, Aleksandar Dimitrijević, Michael B. Buchholz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000217612
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

This book is the first comprehensive treatment in recent decades of silence and silencing in psychoanalysis from clinical and research perspectives, as well as in philosophy, theology, linguistics, and musicology.

The book approaches silence and silencing on three levels. First, it provides context for psychoanalytic approaches to silence through chapters about silence in phenomenology, theology, linguistics, musicology, and contemporary Western society. Its central part is devoted to the position of silence in psychoanalysis: its types andpossible meanings (a form of resistance, in countertransference, the foundation for listening and further growth), based on both the work of the pioneers of psychoanalysis and on clinical case presentations. Finally, the book includes reports of conversation analytic research of silence in psychotherapeutic sessions and everyday communication. Not only are original techniques reported here for the first time, but research and clinical approaches fit together in significant ways.

This book will be of interest to all psychologists, psychoanalysts, and social scientists, as well as applied researchers, program designers and evaluators, educators, leaders, andstudents. It will also provide valuable insight to anyone interested in the social practices of silence and silencing, and the roles these play in everyday social interactions.

Part I

Cultural

Part I

Introduction to Part I

When a patient is silent, we do not think about the nature of the phenomenon of silence. Preoccupied with the psychological meaning of that person’s silence at that specific moment, we tend to overlook the fundamental questions about it. Silence, for instance, certainly exists in nature, but is it a natural phenomenon? Is silence in nature a mere absence of sound or a phenomenon with foundation and purpose of its own? Is it integral to beauty and communication? Should it be a part of our value system? These questions transcend the domains of psychology and psychoanalysis, but they are integral to many individuals and traditions in theology, philosophy, aesthetics, or linguistics. This book opens with essays about these fundamental questions related to silence as human experience and as a (super)natural phenomenon.

In the first chapter, Donna Orange utilizes her double identity of a philosopher and a psychoanalyst to review various phenomenological approaches to silence (“pregnant silence,” “threatening silence,” “trauma-frozen silence,” and “silence as complicity”) mostly dwelling on Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. She also connects her intense sense of social responsibility with her profound clinical experience and shows that silence can also be full of violence, traumatizing, especially when it becomes active silencing. There is, however, also hope in the form of “unfrozen silence” and of personal statements like “no one in our generation ever beat their children.”

Colum Kenny then enriches this volume by a silence-walk through the history of religions from Egypt and ancient Greek culture to Christianity, balanced by reporting on silence in India and other Eastern traditions, as well as in Judaism and Buddhism. Kenny masterfully weaves the story about facets of all these traditions that claim one and the same thing—“God is silence.” He also sets the experience of deep silence in meditation in relation to religious experience—and separates one from the other in order to open this experience for people who do not want to join any kind of religious group thinking.

A prominent linguist, Silvia Bonacchi from Warsaw, delivers an insight into how silence and silencing are understood in her field. The linguistic approach has been to set silence in relation to speech, and silence has been viewed as the absence of speech. Bonacchi only refers to these starting points in order to step over to relevant contemporary authors who have written about the rhetoric of silence. She describes the role and function of silencing with distinctions like endo- and exophasia, which are sometimes followed by esophasia; sometimes we use words for thinking, sometimes for speaking, and sometimes both modes are responded to by respecting the deep need for silence. Sometimes we regain our sense of being within a conversational flow from which we emerge with better cognitive and emotional elaboration. This is an important dimension of therapeutic talk. Interestingly, this same dimension is found in the conversation analytic study by Dreyer and Franzen (Chapter 15). Silence is endowed with a quality to restore human resonance, as Bonacchi describes with reference to many psychoanalytic authors, such as Michael Balint. She also gives rich hints as to the communicative power of the silencing process.

Helga de la Motte-Haber’s chapter graces this volume with an extremely knowledgeable contribution about silence in music. She starts by considering whether to speak of silence in music could be thought of as a joke. Along the way, we learn that it is not, that it is more a paradox, a paradox of humanity, which she spells out with great precision. As music has deep origins in religious rituals of all kinds, it is no wonder that this dimension is again touched upon. De la Motte-Haber analyses the role of silence in the creations of many composers, from Händel, Haydn, and Mozart, to Debussy and Ravel, to Xenakis, Nono, Feldman, and John Cage.

When Patrick Shen, a prominent film-maker and author of In pursuit of Silence, quotes the words of the ancient wise man Chuang Tzu, who wishes to talk to a man who has forgotten all words, he illuminates the same paradox that was tackled in de la Motte-Haber’s chapter. To talk to someone who has lost all words seems impossible, but we are led to understand that in studying silence sometimes talking is the more serious problem. Shen gives a critique of a culture which has lost a deeper sense of how this paradox can be balanced. Culture, in this view, is a human achievement to teach its members how to handle times of talk and to profoundly value times of silence. Losing touch with this issue equals losing depth. And this sounds like a very precise description of contemporary Western culture, where Shen hopes “we may devise methods to restore and protect that silence for future generations.”

We believe that the position and role of silence in psychoanalysis cannot be fully grasped without being contextualized by the five essays in the first part and hope that the direct link will be obvious to readers too.

Chapter 1

Silence in phenomenology

Dream or nightmare?

Donna Orange

Silence, at best, is ambiguous. It may protect, attack, or give consent. One may be reduced to silence either by humiliation, or out of failure to find the right word. One may be struck silent by art, by holiness, by outrageousness. Persons or groups may find themselves silenced through acts of familial, cultural or political domination, even by violence. Probably every human being has some experiences with silence, with silencing others, or having been silenced. David Kleinberg-Levin provides an evocative list, challenging all explanations:

What comes to mind are these: the heavy silence of one going deep into her grief; the silence of one whom unspeakable horror has rendered speechless; the awkward silence of shame or embarrassment; the aggressive silence of one who is hiding his guilt; the benumbed silence of a deep depression; the silence of an anger which accuses and causes hurt by using silence as a weapon; withholding the kindness of speech; the heroic silence of the political prisoner, who refuses to surrender the names of his comrades even under extremes of torture; the guarded silence of citizens who must endure constant surveillance under the rule of a police state; the silence of timidity; the silence of shyness; the silence of rapt attention; the silence of prayer; the silence of spellbound anticipation; the silence of a joy that needs to be deeply felt.

(p. 100)

No phenomenological account of silence can fail to address this array, if only indirectly.

But what is silence itself? Phenomenology, of course, ever allergic to universalizing definitions and mindful of Wittgenstein’s family resemblances, will look to descriptions and contexts. Let us first trace a meandering path through silence in the company of phenomenologists Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Emmanuel Levinas. Finally, we return to the everyday silences of clinical work, to see what phenomenologists might teach working psychoanalysts, and vice versa.

Pregnant silence

Sartre, writing after the war about the resistance, saw silence as a heroic act of freedom. Kleinberg-Levin’s list surely has Sartre’s “republic of silence” in mind:

We were never more free than during the German occupation. We had lost all our rights, beginning with the right to talk. Every day we were insulted to our faces and had to take it in silence. Under one pretext or another, as workers, Jews, or political prisoners, we were deported EN MASSE. Everywhere, on billboards, in the newspapers, on the screen, we encountered the revolting and insipid picture of ourselves that our oppressors wanted us to accept. And, because of all this, we were free. Because the Nazi venom seeped even into our thoughts, every accurate thought was a conquest. Because an all-powerful police tried to force us to hold our tongues, every word took on the value of a declaration of principles…

(In Liebling, 1947, pp. 498–500)

Thus Sartre teaches us first about the effects of violent silencing. He continues, indicating that keeping silence may also be heroic:

All those among us – and what Frenchman was not at one time or another in this situation who knew any details concerning the Resistance--asked themselves anxiously, “If they torture me, shall I be able to keep silent?” Thus the basic question of liberty itself was posed, and we were brought to the verge of the deepest knowledge that man can have of himself…. It was completely forlorn and unbefriended that they held out against torture, alone and naked in the presence of torturers, clean-shaven, well-fed, and well-clothed, who laughed at their cringing flesh, and to whom an untroubled conscience and a boundless sense of social strength gave every appearance of being in the right. Alone. Without a friendly hand or a word of encouragement. Yet, in the depth of their solitude, it was the others that they were protecting, all the others, all their comrades in the Resistance. Total responsibility in total solitude – is this not the very definition of our liberty?

(In Liebling, 1947, pp. 498–500)

Merleau-Ponty, explicitly addressing Sartre but implicitly speaking to all who have considered silence a mere lack of noise or the opposite of speech, provides another surprising account in his 1952 “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence”. Silence speaks, in particular through the work of Cezanne or Klee.¹ From depths before, after, under, and between words or music, but intricately involved in them and providing to them layers of meaning, silence can be full, generous, and generative. “We should consider speech before it has been pronounced,” Merleau-Ponty later wrote, “against the ground of silence which precedes it, and without which it would say nothing” (1973, pp. 45–46). When the conductor raises her baton to evoke a “Kyrie” or the expected notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, when a pause follows an unexpected question, silence creates the breath or ground for music, for painting, or for language. At the end of a talk, a story, or a concert, a moment of silence, unpremeditated, may testify to the depth of feeling produced in the audience. When someone has revealed something shockingly painful, perhaps the loss of a child or a terminal prognosis, a reverent, receptive, compassionate silence must often precede any few words that may be possible. “Oh, oh, oh,” may be all we can say. Silence may accompany and witness.

Merleau-Ponty, however, meant to speak a silence even more inclusive and originary than what his earlier words have suggested to me. As in Schelling before him, he came in his last years to identify silence with nature itself,² not contrasted with language—“language lives only from silence”³—but as its very underpinning. A language, he wrote, “sometimes remains a long time pregnant with transformations which are to come… even if only in the form of a gap, a need, or a tendency” (1964, p. 41). In its indirectness, all language is silence (1964, p. 43). In his recent Merleau-Ponty and the Face of the World: Silence, Ethics, Imagination, and Poetic Ontology (2016), Glen Mazis places silence at the center of Merleau-Ponty’s early account of perception as well as of his mature work on chiasm and intertwining. Silence becomes the invisible source of the visible. Not a literal silence, it occurs in painting, in music, in poetry. Expressive and lyrical, it gives sense to the sensible.

But this silence can be stumped. We can avoid it, but only at our peril. Long before computers and the internet dominated our daily lives, Merleau-Ponty warned of reducing thinking to data-collecting. In the name of science we then test, operate, and transform the data. In this way, he wrote, “we enter into a cultural regimen in which there is neither truth nor falsehood concerning hu...