Reliving the last goodbye: the psychotherapy of an almost silent patient.
Periods of silence in psychotherapy have many meanings and often possess extreme emotional power. In this paper I will describe prolonged silences shared with a young woman, which had an unconscious significance not yet explored in the extensive psychoanalytic literature concerning silence. Within the context of a 30-session focal psychotherapy she was comfortably silent most of the time during our first 25 meetings. Her serene soundlessness was eventually understood as a reliving of the quiet Olympian detachment she had observed in her father as he lay dying a few years earlier.
D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D001008:Anxiety Disorders / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D003863:Depression / Q000523:psychology / Q000628:therapy; D005219:Father-Child Relations; D005260:Female; D006117:Grief; D006801:Humans; D009633:Nonverbal Communication; D011369:Professional-Patient Relations; D011573:Psychoanalytic Interpretation; D011575:Psychoanalytic Therapy; D014167:Transference, Psychology; D014705:Verbal Behavior