![Sample our Behavioral Sciences journals, sign in here to start your access, latest two full volumes FREE to you for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/110801/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Behavioral-Sciences.jpg"})
Abstract
Psychoanalysis has understood silence either as a defence, a symptom or as a necessary punctuation, but it is more intensely a part of language than these explanations would suggest. This paper aims to show that philosophy may supply a more adequate understanding of silence in clinical practice than has hitherto been possible. Without philosophy, psychoanalysis can given no very coherent account of silence. Contemporary attempts in psychotherapy to reinstate a value to silence have misunderstood it and imbued it with quasi mystical qualities.
∗. This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the ISPS Conference held in Manchester in September 2004
By putting silence back within the orbit of language this paper avoids the categorical mistakes in our understanding of this phenomenon, which are common in the literature. Far from being an impediment to psychotherapy, silence has a significance and value which make it an essential ally of speech in the therapeutic process. This has particular implications in a therapeutic community, where there is the possibility to develop quiet areas in the unit which can form part of the treatment environment and serve to provoke a reparative introspection.
Notes
∗. This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the ISPS Conference held in Manchester in September 2004
1. ‘Sapiens verbis innotescit paucis’ is how Rufinus' Latin translation has it. Sextus Pythagoricus, Enchiridion 145 in Chadwick.
2. Olphe‐Galliard's study is still recognized, some 70 years on, as a major contribution to our understanding of pagan asceticism. He concludes: ‘Dans le néo‐platonisme, l'ascèse païenne a atteint son sommet. Nettement religieux d'inspiration et profondément spiritualiste, Plotin a concentré les courants idéalistes de la pensée, sur lesquels d'ailleurs le christianisme en plein progrés n'était pas sans exercer son influence’.
3. Interestingly, Peter Brown argues that Cassian's monastic perspective is that of a psychotherapist precisely because he follows Origen, rather than Augustine! This is particularly true, he thinks, in Cassian's assessment of the possibility of change in the personality. A bias he later qualifies with regard to the place of sexuality. Thus, he writes of Cassian, ‘sexuality, for him, was not what it has become in the lay imagination of a post‐Freudian age. It was not the basic instinctual drive, of which all others were secondary refractions. It was the other way around. The colder drives that lured the human person into collusion with the demonic world … lay deeper in his identity than did sexual desire. Sexuality was a mere epiphenomenon. Sexual dreams and sexual temptations betrayed the tread of far heavier beasts within the soul – anger, greed, avarice, and vainglory’ (Brown Citation1991: 421–422; cf. Cassian, Date? and Chadwick Citation1963).
4. From a cultural and linguistic point of view, any serious analysis of the progress of our understanding of silence, would need to take account not only the transition in translation of Greek concepts like hesychia to the Latin otium (cf. Hausherr Citation1959), but also the way the complex change of meanings relate to vocabulary. That is to say the distinction between, for example, silentio and taciturnitas, in different late Latin authors; inner stillness (silentium, cum summo silentio, tacere) and its implication (mansuetudo, patienter, cum gravitate) or its antithesis (inquietos, quietus non fuerit). As well as questions of rhetoric or discipline in speech (multum loqui … scurrilitates) and motives for the cultivation of silence, fostering silence and its relation to listening (tacere et audire … propter taciturnitatis gravitatem). See Clément (Citation1978).
5. On the longevity of Neoplatonism and classical notions in general see, for example, Edwards (date?).
6. We may take note that not only was Freud a man of letters steeped in the classics, as was Bion after him and Bion's contemporary Lacan. Freud discovered in classical literature the foundation for many of his key concepts, an appreciation of which has led to a whole corpus of literature in which psychoanalytic ideas are used to study writers from antiquity (Kelsen Citation1942, Devereux Citation1967, Slater Citation1968). To use Gadamer's phrase, ‘history does not belong to us but rather we belong to it’ (Gadamer 1993) and consequently, we cannot overestimate the powerful influence which the saeculum – we might say, the historical paideia – exerts over us.
7. In old age Gadamer spoke increasingly of the limits of language, and indeed in 1985 it formed the title of a speech he gave (Grondin Citation2003). He came to consider the limits of language fundamental to a hermeneutics of finitude, and described one of the highest principles of hermeneutics that ‘we can never say everything we would like to say’ (Grondin Citation2003: 328). This limit to language corresponds, in many ways, to the unsayable in Wittgenstein. However, it is more closely aligned to that of his teacher, Heidegger and in this sense is more clearly an existential statement about man's finitude (Grondin Citation2003: 328).
8. The word mystical comes from the Greek muein (to close the lips) and refers to beliefs that cannot be spoken about. Hence that form of religion which is mystical is that which is a secret teaching (the mysteries).
9. In the Tractatus (6.52) Wittgenstein re‐worked a sentence from his Notebooks 1914–1916. It reads as follows: ‘The urge towards the mystical comes of the non‐satisfaction of our wishes by science. We feel that even if all possible scientific questions are answered our problem is still not touched at all’ (cited by D'hert Citation1978: 32).
10. Interestingly, Wittgenstein himself was aware that his method bore some resemblance to psychoanalysis. Like the analyst he made the patient (or philosopher) in the grip of a misguided picture, aware of what he was doing and endeavoured to elicit from the person bafflement, reveal points of tension, illusion and lay bare conflict (Baker and Hacker Citation1980, 486–487 and n.23). However Wittgenstein disliked Freud and for an interesting reason. He saw Freud like Darwin and considered the major appeal of their theories to lie in their resemblance to mythology, cf. Baker and Hacker (Citation1980): 508, 508 n, 536, 540, 547, 640). See also Kenny (Citation1980: 18).