Reliving the last goodbye: the psychotherapy of an almost silent patient

Periods of silence in psychotherapy have many meanings and often possess extreme emotional power. In this paper I will describe prolonged silences shared with a young woman, which had an unconscious significance not yet explored in the extensive psychoanalytic literature concerning silence. Within the context of a 30-session focal psychotherapy she was comfortably silent most of the time during our first 25 meetings. Her serene soundlessness was eventually understood as a reliving of the quiet Olympian detachment she had observed in her father as he lay dying a few years earlier.