ABSTRACT
In this chapter, Donna Orange utilizes her double identity of a philosopher and a psychoanalyst to review various phenomenological approaches to silence (“pregnant silence,” “threatening silence,” “trauma-frozen silence,” and “silence as complicity”) mostly dwelling on Merleau-Ponty and Levinas. She also connects her intense sense of social responsibility with her profound clinical experience and shows that silence can also be full of violence, traumatizing, especially when it becomes active silencing. There is, however, also hope in the form of “unfrozen silence” and of personal statements like “no one in our generation ever beat their children.”
