The Importance of Being and Silence and the Role of Love in Analysis

ABSTRACT

The author discusses “silence” as key to her analytic work with adults and children. Silence refers to a quality of presence, of listening and “being with the patient.” In silence, human connection and love can arise and healing occurs, as a deeper feeling for life’s mystery enters. Moments of communion may awaken the healing power of love through feeling, images, and sensations, allowing the creative energies of the psyche to enter analytic work in a way that heals and transforms suffering. The author presents cases of a severely traumatized child and an adult to illustrate how, by admitting silence and love, the self begins to emerge with joyous spontaneity.

KEY WORDS:

• abuse
• adult analysis
• being
• child analysis
• creation
• doing
• hate
• identity
• love
• meeting
• mystery
• nonverbal
• reclamatory
• relational
• relationship
• silence
• space
• transcendent function
• transference
• trauma

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank Jungian analyst Grace Reid for her careful and thoughtful edits and suggestions.

NOTE

The Collected Works of C. G. Jung are cited in the text as CW, volume number, and paragraph number. The Collected Works are published in English by Routledge (UK) and Princeton University Press (USA).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Maria Ellen Chiaia

MARIA ELLEN CHIAIA, PhD, MFT, is a child and adult Jungian psychoanalyst in private practice in Berkeley and Marin County, California. She is an analyst member of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco and a teaching member of the International Society for Sandplay Therapy. She teaches and consults at the SF Jung Institute and various other institutes, nationally and internationally, and has authored many articles and book chapters. She also co-authored Sandplay in Three Voices: Images, Relationship, the Numinous, published by Routledge (2005). Her work revolves around the relational field, the experience of nonverbal states, the imagination, and finding meaning and spirit. Correspondence: [email protected].