ABSTRACT
An early and enchanting work on silence is that by Max Picard, whose Die Welt des Schweigens appeared in 1948. From his remarkable little book, it is clear that Picard regarded silence as much more than the absence of sound. He writes, silence is the firstborn of the basic phenomena. It envelops the other basic phenomena—love, loyalty, and death; and there is more silence than speech in them, more of the invisible than the visible. Picard eloquently proclaims the value of silence, sometimes in a way that appeals to intuitively while not necessarily bearing close logical scrutiny. Picard was by no means the only person interested in silence in the mid 20th century. Others included Sidney Baker, who developed a psychological theory based on the idea that the very aim of speech, conscious or unconscious, was silence. The relationship of silence to forms of therapy is one aspect of the field that has been of growing interest.
