In a Silent Way: Harold Searles on the kinds of silence

My first and last aim as a therapist is to listen well; it was the skill I focused on developing in my early training. Listening well is like being able to run 10 miles (without feeling you are dying): you have to be doing a lot of other things right in order to pull it off.

One of the subtler aspects of listening well involves getting curious about silences—the other person’s and our own. Years ago, at the recommendation of my teacher and friend, Catherine Adler, I picked up Harold Searles’ book My Work with Borderline Patients. A penetrating observer of relational dynamics, Searles expanded my thinking about silence. While he’s speaking as a psychoanalyst to analysts, anyone interested in the meanings of silence will find him compelling.

Here’s an excerpt from a longer reflection on the kinds of silence in My Work with Borderline Patients. I’ll let Searles have the last word.

I surmise that in working with any patient of whatever diagnostic category, my silence is my most reliably effective therapeutic tool; surely this is the case in my work with borderline individuals. One patient after another eventually comes in course of time to realize that, as one put it with surprise, “your silence must really be getting to me,” whereas all, or nearly all, my verbal interpretations have failed to do so.

It is easy for an analyst to maintain an unexamined illusion, about himself, that so long as he is being silent, he is functioning in an essentially emotionally neutral fashion during the session, in the best classically analytic tradition. It is well for us to realize, on the contrary, the patient’s diverse transference-reactions to one’s silence have, in all probability, some significant basis in the reality of the kind of silence one is presenting to them. Just as we find patients’ silent demeanors to cover a wide range of feeling states, from emotional-remoteness to hopelessness to discouragement to sexually seductive invitingness to paranoid stonewall antagonism to what-not, so we need to be attentive to the circumstance that the particular kind of silence we are manifesting, at any moment, may be anything but dispassionate. It has been difficult but helpful for me to realize, for instance, in my work with one or another borderline patient who was much given to paranoid-antagonistic silences, that my own silence was an all probability being experienced by him, to a degree quite accurately, as being of essentially that same inhospitably stone-wall, or bristlingly antagonistic, threatened and threatening nature. As I have come to see these things more clearly, it has been less baffling to me to find that the patient is having great difficulty in associating it all freely and in reporting to me such associations.