ABSTRACT
Silence in the analytic situation is a recurrent and complex clinical phenomenon. Recently Arlow and Zeligs have discussed exhaustively the patient’s silence as serving the functions of discharge, defence and communication in the analytic situation. This chapter shows that the primary function of patient's silence was to communicate through the transference and the analytic process a very disturbed early childhood relationship to his mother which had brought about identity diffusion. Erikson in discussing the therapeutic problems encountered in the clinical handling of identity-diffusion in adolescents, details ‘a phase of particular malignancy’ and ‘the rock-bottom attitude’ which accompanies the search for ‘the ultimate limit of regression and the only firm foundation for a renewed progression’. He relates these to Kris’s concept of ‘regression in the service of the ego’. Winnicott discusses pertinently ‘the close relationship that exists between the normal difficulties of adolescence and the abnormality that may be called the antisocial tendency’.
