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Today one of my patients - a handsome, shy, talented young man - announced at the start of the hour that he had fallen in love since I saw him last week, and was eager to tell me the whole story. It was not only extremely interesting but also a rare event in his life. When he began, I had a strong hunch that I should let him speak without asking any questions or interrupting. An inner voice told me that he would talk the whole hour so both he and I would be listeners, and it would be wrong for me to talk. That was a value judgment. I said to myself, "Harry, just listen. Listen to every word, silence, and metaphor, but keep your mouth shut, except for a nod now and then with 'uhuh' or 'yes.' "
I followed the doctor's orders, and was pleased to listen to the story unfold in its own way. At the end of the hour, I said a few words. When I listen this attentively, I can be certain that whatever I say - if I do not say much - will be appropriate. I compare this role to a solitary naturalist walking along a small rushing creek in a previously unknown place in the forest, noting everything seen and heard.
As a rule, when people say, "I just listened," they mean they listened with a part of their attention focused on the other, and another part on themselves. Real listening is a form of communion of being - never just listening, and never wholly possible. Because it is healing, it is one of the joys of being an analyst. The temptation to make big interpretations and ask penetrating questions in such a normal life crisis is apt to be motivated to assure therapists of their own creativity or brilliance, or an unnecessary justification for being there.
Total listening is silent, compassionate communication. The words are held in the inner dialogue in the listener's mind, being the Great Teacher, as in Socratic terms, the daemonian that sits on your shoulder, speaking just to you.
The above example of listening represents a process desperately needed to counteract the increasingly insensitive gap-filling American jabbering. Sir Laurens van der Post warns us:
For the highest price men have always paid and still pay for all they acquire, whether of matter or spirit, is a psychological one. Human cultures at their most creative best have tried to ensure that what was bought or earned or sought after was also psychologically or spiritually or, at the very least, aesthetically worth it, and of some abiding value, unconnected with any functional significance of the moment. But all these considerations have tended to vanish from contemporary value, and man is increasingly regarded as output or export fodder, and the reward he earns in the process more and more exclusively calculated in materialistic terms. Behind all this, there seems to me to be betrayal of the most reprehensible kind, subversion of a kind not spun by some subtle Russian with snow on his boots in some unheated basement in the Kremlin, but by the institutions and vocations which Western man has evolved precisely in order to protect himself against this sort of treason. ... [van der Post says that this is] the fourth dimension betrayal by the guardians of his spirit, the churches, priests, doctors and teachers of his day.
I lump them together because they are uniquely charged by life with the task of keeping man and his society whole. [[van der Post, Sir Laurens. "The Dreamer that Remains" in The Rock Rabbit and the Rainbow edited by Robert Hinshaw. Einsiedeln, Switzerland: Daimon Verlag, 1998, pp. 318-19. ]]
A poem by Thomas Merton:
In Silence
Be still
Listen to the stones of the wall
Be silent, they try to speak your
Name.
Listen
To the living walls.
Who are you?
Who
Are you? Whose
Silence are you? [[Merton, Thomas, The Seven Storey Mountain. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1984, p. 293. ]]
In the late 1960s, Dr. Kenneth Colby, a Freudian training analyst at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, was reporting research success using a computer program he called DOCTOR to act as a psychotherapist. His program was based on a natural language computer program for nondirective psychotherapy created by Joseph Weizenbaum at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Program in 1966, called ELIZA after Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady (based on G. B. Shaw's play, Pygmalion). Weizenbaum was surprised when people whom he tested were convinced that the machine understood them and requested private consultation with the computer.
It is understandable that almost forty years ago, leaders at the orthodox Freudian Institute did not look kindly on a mechanical psychotherapy with a technician at the controls. Colby, a brilliant teacher and well-liked analyst in the San Francisco Institute, found himself demoted from the role of training analyst to an ordinary psychoanalyst. His research in psychotherapy, however, was welcomed by the Stanford University psychology department. Colby left San Francisco and came to Palo Alto, where I invited him to share my private practice office with me.
Subjects (read patients) spoke with a nonhuman respondent (read therapist) in a box, which could be turned on or off at will. They could silence the therapist if they did not like the response. Obviously, a canned analyst practicing psychotherapy (not psychoanalysis) was persona non grata to the practitioners of the art of analysis - which they maintained was a science. Colby was carrying out scientific research to assess patterns of words in therapeutic dialogue.
Philip DeMuth, in an article entitled "Eliza and Her Offspring," summed up the advantages of a computer over a human psychotherapist in a whimsical and insightful manner:
It is never tired. It does not get impatient or enmeshed in countertransference difficulties. It is not concerned with the fight it had with its wife or husband that morning when it was supposed to be listening to clients, or wishing it was on the golf course. It works twenty-four hours a day for a few cents worth of electricity. And ELIZA doesn't have sex with clients. [[DeMuth, Philip. "Eliza and Her Offspring" in Literature and Medicine, Vol. 4: Psychiatry and Medicine, edited by Peter W. Graham. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985, pp. 138-39. ]]
Colby continued his research, but Weizenbaum subsequently declared that "computerized psychotherapy is immoral and obscene [because] the computer fails to provide interpersonal respect and understanding." [[Ibid. ]]
I had the following dialogue with one of my patients, who was a distinguished professor:
Harry: "When I tell you that I am interested in silence, what do you think of? What can you tell me?"
Professor: "Well, one thing I will begin with: When you are talking, I am not really silent. Silence is 'I am listening to you.' It seems to me that out of silence comes the word. At first, there is silence, and then there is the word, so that without silence there can be no creativity. I think the problem is expressed by the Buddhists - that the mind is a kind of monkey, and it's hard to tame it. It's jumping around all over the place. I can experience silence, but it's almost like I have to be distracted to do that. So, one way I have been able to do that is through drumming, and having something, in a sense, distracting my mind process."
Harry: "Would you talk about drumming? It is noise. It is rhythm. It is music. It is sound. How does that create silence for you?"
Professor: "Well, yeah, it's an outer distraction-noise that [pause] silence has to be in it. I mean [pause] silence would have to be the silence within, so that it is beating out other noises. These noises stay, but it's beating the noise inside, or fooling the mind in a way, - tricking it to stop. [Pause] Silence to me also seems to be timeless. When one is in silence, one is not aware of the ticking of the clock inside oneself. Out of that comes my creativity."
Harry: "When you think of silent places, what occurs to you?"
Professor: "Well, first of all darkness, kind of like Genesis."
Harry: "The Darkness."
Professor: "Yes. The spirit hovering above the Darkness. Peace. Tranquillity. I think of the north - the direction of the North - and I think of snow and the white. You know, like in a snowstorm: you are blinded. And it seems like in a Silence, you have to be blinded or deafened, in a way. The Arctic silence. Other than that, just images come."
Harry: "Well, we have a paradox in carrying on a conversation about silence, don't we?"
Professor: "Exactly! [laughter] We don't let the silence continue very long."
Harry: "I am reminded of the Tao: 'He who talks does not know. And he who knows does not talk.'"
Professor: "Exactly. And the same with the Upanishads or Hinduism."
Harry: "For example?"
Professor: "Well, exactly what you are saying: He who knows about being Brahman cannot speak of it, and he who speaks of it, does not know it. So, Brahman is silent, and you can't use words to describe it. Of course, the Upanishad is all words, but that is what we are talking about."
Harry: "Words."
The professor then speaks of the mythology of Trickster Monkey. Darkness and North are not associated with creativity but with cold, sterility, Satan, freezing, and death. North is the direction of the end of the earth. He emphasizes the world of the spirit and the visions of Eastern philosophy and religion in contrast to the Western culture of words, science, and reason.
Shaw's play, based on the mythology of Pygmalion, was adapted in the musical, My Fair Lady, in which Professor Henry Higgins achieves scientific triumph in transforming Eliza from a street urchin flower girl into an elegant, lovely, articulate woman. When Eliza returns from a triumphant performance at the grand ball where she was accepted as a Hungarian princess of royal blood, Professor Higgins spouts endless words of self-congratulation and ignores Eliza, who sings of the folly of words in place of love:
Words
Words
Words.
I am sick of words.
I get them all day through.
First from him
Now from you.
Is that all you blighters can do?
Show me!
SHOW ME! [[Lerner, Alan Jay. My Fair Lady (adaptation and lyrics). New York: Coward-McCann, 1956. (Music by Frederick Lowe.) ]]
It is important that both man and woman can balance silent and talk space, like quanta listening.
My wife and I have solved this problem of who speaks and who listens silently, who is right and who is wrong, by adopting this pragmatic and firm rule: We agree that on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays Jane knows everything, and that on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays I know everything. That leaves Sunday when nobody knows anything. It works because if we get into a fight one of us will invoke the fool-proof equation that never fails to amuse us.
Naturally it helps to have a sense of humor. When someone at a cocktail party told Dorothy Parker that she was outspoken, Dorothy replied, "By whom?" The telephone can outtalk me when I am put on hold and flooded with inane messages I do not want to hear, music to send a message, and various comments that public relations people have programmed to regurgitate on the hapless person on hold.
The American addiction to gap-talking in order to obliterate silent spaces is magnified on radio. There is a continuous seepage of word noise on talk shows like toxic pollutants of the airways. Radio is a model of serious gap-filling noise. It is so ubiquitous that it profoundly influences the American psyche. We become radios.
Max Picard says that the world of radio is based on the noise of words:
Radio is a machine producing absolute verbal noise. The content hardly matters any longer; the production of noise is the main concern. It is as though words were being ground down by radio, transformed into an amorphous mass.
There is no silence in radio or true words either, for a situation has been created in which silence is no longer missed and words are no longer missed either, in which words are ground down to mere radio-noise, in which everything is present and at the same time nothing is present. ...
Everything on radio is constantly on the move, in a state of perpetual flux; nothing is concretely fixed and stable. Past, present and future are all mixed up together in one long drawn-out noise. ...
Wireless sets are like constantly firing automatic pistols shooting at silence.
Behind all this noise the enemy lurks in hiding: silence.
The noise of radio is becoming more and more violent, because the fear is becoming more and more acute that it may suddenly be attacked by silence and the real world. [[Picard, World of Silence, pp. 189-90, 209. ]]
I have written a radio script entitled:
Always It Is Silent or It Is Not Silent:
A Tautology in Three Acts
ACT ONE: The Silent Scream Is the Curse of Silence
Man: Yes (applause)
Woman: Yes (louder applause)
Chorus: Yes (silence)
ACT TWO: Just Say No and Say No More
Man: No (applause)
Woman: No (no applause)
Chorus: No (torpor)
ACT THREE: Silence Is a Blessing and a Damnation
Man: Yes (drum roll)
Woman: No (church bells)
Chorus: Yes (stupor)
I telephoned my Jungian analyst in San Francisco, Joseph Henderson, to congratulate him on his ninety-second birthday (September 10, 1995). He was vigorous, alert, still practicing, and highly articulate. The following is a transcription of part of our conversation:
Joe: "Rollo May's wife gave a birthday party for me and Helena [Joe's wife] last night, and I was saying that I had been to my ophthalmologist this spring. He is a new man, and he and his assistant were very interested in me because I am still working at my age. So they were asking me questions about it. I told them that I take one week a month off from seeing patients. My ophthalmologist said, 'What do you do with your week off?' And I said, 'Nothing.'
That absolutely fascinated them as they thought it spoke to the kind of workaholic attitude of modern professional life. One of them told me recently, 'You know, I took off the month of July and did nothing!' In other words, that concept of nothing balances too much activity."
Harry: "That's the basis of my book."
Joe: "Sure. It must be."
Harry: "Sometimes after a busy day, I just sit in my study and do nothing. I may hold my cat on my lap for an hour and just sit still. Sometimes I doze. Mitten is the quietest, most alert animal to sounds - turns and cups his ears like radar antennae tracking sounds I cannot hear. I used to think that sitting and doing nothing was wasting time."
Joe: "That helps the psyche catch up with itself, and you get a new life, a new spirit."
... said Christopher Robin, "but what I like doing best is Nothing."
"How do you do Nothing?" asked Pooh, after he had wondered for a long time.
"Well, it's when people call out at you just as you're going off to do it, 'What are you going to do, Christopher Robin?' and you say, 'Oh, nothing,' and you go and do it."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh.
"This is a nothing sort of thing that we're doing now."
"Oh, I see," said Pooh again.
"It means just going along, listening to all the things you can't hear, and not bothering."
"Oh!" said Pooh. [[Milne, A. A. The House at Pooh Corner. New York: Dutton, 1928, pp. 172-73. ]]
A Zenrin poem says:
Sitting quietly, doing nothing,
Spring comes, and the grass grows by itself. [[Zenrin in The Way of Zen by Alan W. Watts. New York: New American Library/Mentor Book, 1957, p. 133. ]]
In Jewish life, Shabbat, the sabbath, was the time to stop doing in the ordinary world and to study the Torah, sing, dance, celebrate, and reflect on the previous six days. Arthur Washkow, director of the Salam Center, said in an article on the early Jewish monks, who were called Therapeutae:
If there were a single piece of Jewish wisdom that was the most important to impart to the human race at this very moment in history it would be the importance of the Shabbat. I mean the generally profound sense of pausing to be, to reflect, and to break the addiction to working, producing, making, inventing. We need to be able to say, "Hey! We have done extraordinary things, now let us pause." [[Washkow, Arthur (from an interview with Martin Marty), in Context, April 1996, p. 6. ]]
When Americans want silence, they usually want other people to be silent so they can speak for and of themselves. A cartoon in the New Yorker showed a tall man talking down to a woman at a cocktail party, saying, "Let's go somewhere I can talk." Silence, listening, pausing, and doing nothing compulsively require discipline and techniques so we can make ourselves not be doing and not be talking. In the American culture of individuality and free speech, there is a premium on speaking up, saying what's on your mind - in short, getting it out. Individuality becomes individualism, with all the darkness of "isms." Couple this notion with the American expectation to be first, biggest, best, and always a winner and you have explosive noises and violence.
When I am caught in me-me-me-me conversations, with overlapping dialogues reaching intolerable noise, I become quiet and withdrawn or turn on my selective inattention and cool indifference rather than dial 911 or 1-800-SHUTUP.
Many years ago, when I was treating a patient whom I found boring or too demanding, or sitting in dull lectures where I felt compelled to stay, I squelched the urge to say something extremely critical or boldly state my truth. Then I discovered that I was doodling an "S" that overlapped a "U." It looked like this:
After a while, I realized that the letters "S" and "U" stood for Stanford University. One day while supervising a Stanford psychiatric resident who was reporting a case he was treating, I could see that he believed that what he said was brilliant and ingenious. I thought he was insensitive, and for a highly intelligent doctor, being stupid like only a person with a very high IQ is capable of. I muted my critical comments until I realized he had begun to play the role of teacher-supervisor to me. At this point, I noticed that my doodle had grown a new curlicue, like a tail on the "U." It looked like this:
The addition appeared as the letter "P" and the doodle was no longer "S-U" but "S-U-P," a shorthand sign to myself that I read as "SHUT UP!"
Only retreat into attentive silence would allow my anger to cool. Then maybe I could lead the resident into critical self-scrutiny. I was not very optimistic. I needed to take time off and do nothing while giving up the attempt to change him.
I have since used this moniker when I become aware that someone is strongly objecting to my opinion and does not even want to hear it. This usually means transference if my opinions are taken as a personal affront. I doodle my self-imposed silence and wait.
Just as it is important to learn silence and listening, it is equally important to know when and how to speak out. On this score, I cite Socrates's maxim: primum non tacere, meaning: "First no silence; that is, speak up!" Learning to speak up spontaneously, honestly, and for oneself is a task that almost all of the people who consult me need to learn.
When people are afraid to speak out, intimidated by outer or inner forces, they brood, feel depressed, and commonly assume passive or active meanness to ward off their fears. Once they face the snarling, blaming bully within, their hostile and envious thoughts diminish.
Our propensity to speak up and speak out is determined by our natural temperament, typology, genetic propensities, and environment. People from New York and very large cities are usually more outspoken and argumentative than people from typical rural places. As a general rule, the extravert is compelled to talk and relate and even welcome interactive conflict, in contrast to the introvert, who withdraws, holds back, restrains talking, and avoids confrontations. Extraverted American gap fillers are acquisitive, filling up space with material objects and enjoying the envy of others - witness TV advertisements for new cars.
Thomas Merton, who became a monk at the Trappist monastery of Our Lady of Gethsemane in Kentucky, described his first night at the monastery:
The embrace of it, the silence! I had entered into a solitude that was an impregnable fortress. And the silence that enfolded me, spoke to me, and spoke louder and more eloquently than any voice and in the middle of that quiet, clean-smelling room, with the moon pouring in through the open window, with the warm night air, I realized truly whose house that was, O glorious Mother of God. ... Notre Dame, Notre Dame, all around the world, Notre Dame de Gethsemani. [[Merton, Thomas. The Seven Storey Mountain. New York: Signet Book/New American Library, 1962, pp. 314-15. ]]
Beside the back door of my greenhouse, I have hung an aluminum medallion which reads: "Bidden or Not Bidden, God Is Present." These words are the translation of the Latin words carved in stone over the front door to C. G. Jung's home in Küsnacht, Switzerland: VOCATUS ATQUE NON VOCATUS DEUS ADERIT.
This saying is often noted by admirers of Jung to state, in a sentimental way, that the loving spirit of God will be present whether one wishes it or not. These words are Erasmus' Latin translation of the Greek words of warning that the Delphi Oracle gave the Lacedaemonians when they were planning war against Athens. Jung explained:
It says, yes, the god will be on the spot, but in what form and to what purpose? I have put the inscription there to remind my patients and myself: Timor dei initium sapientae [Psalm 111:10]. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. Here another not less important road begins, not the approach to "Christianity" but to God himself and this seems to be the ultimate question. [[Jung, C. G. Word and Image edited by Aniela Jaffé. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979, pp. 136-39. ]]
I have often walked through that door but it never occurred to me that the words carved above were a warning: to fear whatever form God assumed when I was planning to attack an enemy. I had always felt a glow, that it meant I was entering a sacred place.
Most Jungian students and analysts who know that these words stand over the majestic front door of Jung's home assume a purely religious viewpoint, that the Wise Old Man was reminding those who walked through his front door that God would be present - engraved in stone - and don't forget it. Many admirers of Jung are in awe of this pronouncement. Since they are the words of the Delphi Oracle, awe is not inappropriate.
Being a Jungian analyst, I find the concept of the archetype of theoretical and practical significance. The archetype is a potential form that is realized in countless symbols and embodiments and in instinctual patterns of behavior. Jung conceived the archetypes of a priori patterns for universal symbols, like father or mother. Father becomes the father, who becomes a specific father. Silence per se has no purpose or expression. When it is actualized as a sound in speech, it is called by the name silence. Silence is not an archetype; it is unnamable, and unknowable. When it is expressed in a word, it is no longer silent. I will try to convey these thoughts in whimsical poems on mind and body:
MIND
Silence has no nitty gritty
To get down to.
Silence has no point.
So I cannot give you the point I am making.
I can make noise.
I cannot make silence.
Silence has no direction.
It is everywhere;
Up/down; in/out; N.S.E. & W.
You cannot locate silence on a map
Or with a computer.
Silence has no nitty.
Silence has no gritty.
For the intellectual,
That is a pity.
BODY
We have no earlids.
Eyelids, yes.
No earlids.
We have no body curtains to close off sound.
We have a pair of ears, a pair of eyes
And a paradox of silence.
We do not see all the time
Because we blink.
All the time, we are hearing something
From every direction all around us.
We do not have to turn our heads to hear
Like we do to see.
We are always listening in some fashion.
All we can hear is within the sound range
Of 20 to 20,000 vibrations per second.
My cat can do better.
Schizophrenic patients hear voices
I cannot hear.
Hannah Merker lost almost total hearing at the age of thirty-nine when, skiing for the first time in her life, she fell and had a concussion: "When I opened my eyes, I was on my back. I could see that people were talking, a movie with the sound system suddenly silenced." Her plight was different from the congenitally deaf, who exist in silence never having heard or listened. Realizing that "silence makes us listeners," Merker wrote an autobiography twenty-two years after her accident. She learned American Sign Language, but her remarkable "hearing-ear" dog, Sheena, became her constant guide and protector. Merker's affectionate dog was invaluable in noisy New York City where she lives. Like the Seeing Eye dog, the animal-human bonding reflects a primitive deep connection between the human and the animal world. [[Merker, Hannah. Listening: Ways of Hearing in a Silent World. New York: Harper-Collins, 1994. ]]
When I reflect on seriously difficult times in my life and realize how these adversities and tragic events have, in the end, given me new life, I recall Hugh Downs' interview with a blind man: "Have you been blind all your life?" The man replied, "Not yet."
After graduating from the University of Minnesota Medical School in 1940, I went to the Panama Canal Zone to intern at the Gorgas Memorial Hospital. Gorgas was an army hospital and I held a reserve commission in the navy. I was convinced that the United States was about to be involved in World War II and was eager to finish the internship so I could go on active duty in the navy, aboard a cruiser in the Pacific.
[....]
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