Silence = Communication

Everyone knows the phrase Freud used to open sessions with his patients: “Say whatever comes to your mind.” And to this day, many people picture a psychoanalytic session exactly that way — you show up and talk about everything that’s happening, everything that worries you, everything you remember from childhood, and so on.

In reality, silence is one of the important components of a session, an effective “tool” in its own right. When an analysand falls silent and simply sits with the quiet, something is happening in their psyche that carries real meaning. Evelyne Lignière noted that “a patient can be, can remain, or can become silent at any point in their analysis, for however long, and in any of an endless number of ways.”

In practice, it’s common to see an analysand who finds it hard to stop talking — hiding behind an endless stream of words — for whom stopping feels unfamiliar and staying silent in front of another person feels uncomfortable. Silence gets experienced as somehow unnatural, since surely one is “supposed to” talk. The analyst’s task, then, is to create an environment comfortable enough that the analysand can tolerate the silence — and, through it, be left alone with themselves.

But there are other analysands who simply don’t know what to say in a session, and stay silent for a long stretch — through one meeting, or several. In these moments, the analyst tries not to interrupt the silence, simply staying present, trying to maintain evenly suspended attention. Balint offers an illustration worth quoting: “From the beginning of the session the patient kept silent for more than half an hour; the analyst accepted his silence, imagined what might be happening to the patient, waited, and made no attempt to intervene; he felt no discomfort and no urge to do anything… In the end, bursting into tears, the patient broke the silence… He said that at last he had managed to make contact with himself; since childhood he had never been left alone — there had always been someone nearby, telling him what to do.”

Which is why, for an analyst, what an analysand talks about and what they stay silent about matter equally.