The Silence of the Analyst
Two intakes in a row told me that they wanted a psychotherapist who also talks. What could have given them the idea of the psychotherapist who does not talk? This is an ironic request for me to hear because my supervisors and collegues advise that I lean into silence.
I’ve heard it said that the cognitive behavioral therapist talks more than half the session. This fact astonishes me but I guess most people like being told what to do. Here the difference between the CBT technician and the psychoanalyst is plain: While CBT offers positive solutions to change your repetitions—suggesting that you just try not to think about that—the psychoanalyst makes no such assumption or suggestion but rather creates a space in which something rather less quick is allowed to emerge.
The silence of the analyst then has a number of practical functions:
Obviously, the analyst is mostly silent because this is talk-therapy; it is only therapeutic if the patient is doing most of the talking around here. The silence forms a container, a holding space into which a cosmos of feeling may be projected. The analyst is silent because they are listening; like Jodi Foster using the Very Large Array to listen for alien life, in the movie Contact (1997).
The silence is enigmatic; the enigmatic silence of the analyst becomes the screen upon which may be cast any number of heretofore unacknowledged fantasies, not to mention paranoias; the frame makes a petri dish in which ancient paranoia is allowed to flourish; these are emanations from the primordial environment—that old psycho-ecology. The analyst by no means affirms the paranoia (as chat GPT does; like CBT Chat GBT does a lot of the talking), but rather allows the paranoia to persist in a controlled environment—a new and artificial ecology.
The less the analyst speaks the more potency is given to what they do say. In my short year of seeing patients I am amazed at how much power my words have over the patient—almost as if I were a kind of placebo-wielding doctor…? Or, as Lacan says, The-Person-Who-is-Supposed-to-Know; but I actually do not know. So I have to be very careful with my words. This is, as I’ve said before, a steep learning curve. Because I do not quite understand the power of my speech, it is far better for me, and the patient, to limit how much I talk.
What remains particularly revelatory for me in my first year of seeing patients is that the silence of the analyst is likewise the silence of the entire psychoanalytic apparatus. The great majority of my patients do not know what psychoanalysis is—and nor do I tell them. I do not tell them about Freud, I do not speak of the unconscious, I certainly don’t mention transference. While I remain steeped in all of this stuff and my own institute has gone a very long way in its attempt to indoctrinate me in the subtleties and techniques of Modern Psychoanalysis, in no way do I indoctrinate the patient—as much as I can help it anyways. I include only what the patient brings to me. The world of the treatment is a world of their own invention, fostered by curiosity, space and the interrogative mood.
