ABSTRACT
Patients convey their internal world through the establishment of an environment within the clinical situation, and they necessarily manipulate the analyst through object usage into assuming different functions and roles. There are some patients to whom one could not ever usefully express one's experience as their object, and this must be accepted. The transference-countertransference interaction is an expression of the unthought known. The analyst's disclosure of a selective subjective state of mind is not equivalent to the expression of affect or the revelation of an unanalyzed feeling or phantasy. In the more classical situation the analyst used that silence which is the hallmark of most analyses as a background from which speech expressed meaning, and patient and analyst listened to the free associations. Silence can inhibit or counteract the tendency, providing a kind of ballast, monitoring and even correcting language when it becomes inauthentic.
