ABSTRACT
Leaders who are comfortable with silence and understand it to be as significant a communication as talking promote this transition and provide an important opportunity for self-understanding. This chapter discusses the phenomenology of silence in group psychotherapy including its sources, forms, uses, and meanings. It suggests that silence is as powerful a communication as speaking and notes that silencing, not silence, is problematic. The phase of group development can be an important factor in generating silence, both of the group as a whole and its individual members. Silence can also provide a window into the simultaneous, multi-layered complexity of members' experience in a mature group. Groups can actively silence a new member as a way of hurting the leader for bringing another sibling—and a sick one to boot—into the group. Silence in group therapy can have meaning as diverse as a demand for performance, submission, or admiration to an opportunity for comfort, reflection, or respite.
