by June Lin-Arlow, AMFT

The Impulse Committee is excited to try something completely new: we are seeking submissions for our Potential Space column for the year of 2022. Also, I can’t believe that it is almost 2022. We would like to see Impulse as a space for our community to engage in dialogue and deepen our understanding of analytic topics as they show up in our lives, our work, and the world. We invite you to submit short articles (around 500 words) on the topic of Silence. This topic is commonly discussed in psychoanalysis, the whole idea of a talking cure and all, but we are interested in perspectives that are not commonly spoken about in dominant discourses of psychoanalysis. 

I want to share a few of my personal experiences with silence as a way to encourage you to share yours. I was a Chinese kid who grew up in a low income neighborhood of Black, Latinx, and White children, where my experiences weren’t mirrored by my peers and parents, so I experienced the world as a foreigner. I felt outside of the cliques and groups that naturally formed on the playground or in the cafeteria. The most common question I got from kids at school was an incredulous “what are you?” And then there was the relentless bullying. I looked to others for cues on who to be in order to fit in and silenced my own impulses and desires. We experience moments of silencing when our experience is dissonant with the environment around us, and our culture enforces this silencing through shame and social exclusion. 

Perhaps we have all been in a reading group or class where someone says something that reproduces an oppressive societal dynamic or makes an assumption based on a stereotype. Then there is the pivotal moment when people notice or don’t notice what just happened. Maybe someone speaks up about it, maybe it passes through a glance or eye roll between people who see each other, and maybe it stays in a sinking feeling that is felt alone or not felt at all. When I enter into a new group, I will test the waters by taking a small risk to see if there is room for disagreement or difference. Based on how the people respond, I will decide to bring more or less of myself into the group. Silence can be a complex range of tense, awkward, anxious, piercing, deafening, tired, defeated. What are the conditions that make it possible to break the silence and speak up?

There is also silence on a societal level in discourse and knowledge. I grew up in the American South during the 1990s, in the age of political correctness and colorblindness, where there was a pressure to be polite and pleasant. Certain topics like race, sexuality, and politics were off limits, especially in mixed company where someone could potentially disagree with you. Movements like Black Lives Matter have pushed the envelope of discourse to make it possible for topics that were previously off limits to be spoken about. More people are now able to see their experiences mirrored through mainstream media, but there are still topics that are too incendiary to touch and get avoided. Why are some topics off limits or unspoken? 

We are interested in some of these questions and more. Why do we speak, and why can’t some things be spoken about? Or even thought about? Why do we agree, and what do we lose when we agree? What is the function of silence, and who benefits from it? What does silence have to do with psychological safety? If you’re interested in submitting something, you can email me at jlarlow@ncspp.org.