ABSTRACT
Psychoanalysis is increasingly framing the states of impasse as a fore-closure of space, a collapse of the space for mediation and interpretation. Speaking about silence is, perhaps not surprisingly, something that psychoanalysts do both in their practice and in their literature. And there is a remarkable chain of associations in the psychoanalytic literature by which the hidden or absent female genital claims its power and presence paradoxically, through its very presence as omission and absence. For Sigmund Freud, silence speaks both to the patient's allegiance to unconscious desire and as a resistance to it. One fundamental reason that a patient may at best share most of what occurs to him, as he comes to experience the stream of his thoughts, is that he must content himself with symbols. It may seem that Freud himself, in establishing free association as the primary psychoanalytic technique, championed total freedom of thought and expression, without constraint or boundary.
