What do silences in psychotherapy convey

Abstract: The psychoanalytic theory attaches various meanings to silences. Silences can express wishes, such as the wish to return to a lost paradise in which all wishes will be fulfilled without uttering a word, or that a new experience of calm and secure holding will revive in the arms of the life-giver without the need to express this wish verbally. It is also possible that the silence acts-out a desire for a mature intimate experience. Also, such silence can express the anxiety from the fulfilment of the wish or desire, arising from deep fears from a relationship that embodies dependency, or from the danger of abandonment or loss, or from fear of being engulfed and nullified by the containing object. The author suggests that many silences express the experience of void, emptiness and major absences, as the experience of a "black hole" or the "Dead mother". Yet alongside, one can perceive this same staging as an opening to create unknown experiences, such as the building of a potential space, an area that enables communication, creativity and a dialogue, in growing widening dimensions, from the existence in a single dimension towards life in four dimensions.