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, whose supervisors and collogues advise that I lean into silence. I’ve heard it said that the CBT 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—the quick-fix—the psychoanalyst makes no such assumption or suggestion but rather creates a space—the frame—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. The silence forms a container, a holding space into which a cosmos of feeling may be projected.
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; emanations from the primordial environment. The analyst by no means affirms the paranoia, as chat GPT does, but rather allows it to persist in a controlled environment.
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 for the patient—almost as if I were a kind of shaman…? 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, I’ve said before, a steep learning curve. Because I do not quite understand the power of my speech, it is better for me to limit my speech.
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 talk to them about Freud, I do not speak of the unconscious, I 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 accept only what the patient brings me. The world of the treatment is a world of their own invention. I only provide the space and curiosity, together with the interrogative mood.
