by Amber Trotter, Psy.D.

SPEAK, SILENCE  

Psychoanalysis aims to vocalize that which has previously been silent. Making the unconscious conscious could be rephrased as making silence speak. A “safe space” bounded by strict confidentiality, an intimate relationship, and the signature undisciplined discipline of free association summon the repressed or inchoate unspoken. 

All this fuss begs the question: Why can’t some things be verbalized under normal circumstances? What causes silence? Freud developed an intricate theory of repression, with personal and sociocultural dimensions, to elucidate. Fear of consequence—shame, retaliation, excommunication—seals our lips, and important truths easily slip into hiding, even from our conscious selves. Perhaps at its most basic, communication is about safety. We use words to signal that everything is okay (“No danger here!”) or to ask for what we need to get back to there (“I’m feeling threatened – help!”). Thoughts and feelings that appear to work against that project are readily withheld. 

Psychoanalysis endeavors to transcend this through its basic provisions: safety is a given—no physical fighting or fucking, no telling other members of the tribe. “Speak, silence, you are welcome here,” the analyst says, and yet the invitation is implicit—silent, so to speak.  

The analyst adopts the discipline of silent reverie, like so many mystical seekers, clearing away noisy chatter in hopes of revelation. Silence is fundamental to myriad spiritual practices, an essential ingredient in the project of contacting the numinous. “Sit quietly and listen for a voice that will say, Be more silent. As that happens your soul starts to revive,” writes Rumi. So the analyst watches and listens, like a mother, like a meditation, like an empty vessel waiting without any further objective.  

Silence, then, can be both expansive and repressive, deadening and enlivening, pregnant and hollow. And yet, perhaps never truly empty: the space of the analysts’ silent neutrality is a palpable commodity and the ego-dissolving devotional silence of religious and spiritual practices at best yields the most satiating sort of fullness. There is much to be gained through listening to what silence has to say. 

If that is true, perhaps a deeper analysis is needed to explain why we avoid this practice, why we repress and ignore, why we prattle incessantly even in private. Just as societies demand order to function, silencing subversive voices, so, too, does the psyche. We hone habits and review our lists, talk ourselves in and out of things, convince ourselves that our little lives are very, very important. And we should, up to a point: finding will and meaning is crucial to a psychological wellbeing. Egoless emptiness risks nihilistic dissolution, the dark night of the soul, just as it offers eternal grounding; either way, silence often asks hard questions, forcing change. Listening to silence may necessarily be uncomfortable before it yields comfort. Silence can be scary. So we resist it, perhaps more easily and utterly now than ever in our digital age, and perhaps more forcefully when we most need it, when we most need to listen to the silent, silenced parts of our selves, of our societies.  

I meditate most mornings. I often find I stop when I could most benefit. We are paradoxical creatures. Now, I will stop writing. I hope I have opened a space for others to speak on silence in all its vicissitudes.