Abstract
This chapter presents an instance of primitive communication between patient and analyst that first took place through the medium of silence and then through the medium of the mutual—or shared—dream. Primitive communication may be accomplished either through silence or through compulsive talking, both of which can serve to keep the analyst at a distance. Within the analytic space, silence may not then indicate resistance to the emergence of conflictual verbal material but rather constitute, in itself, a therapeutic milieu wherein a more basic exchange between patient and analyst may occur. Within an object-relations context, the silence can be seen as an enactment of the paranoid-schizoid position. The enactment of that dead silence in the analytic relationship was the affective medium for identifications between analyst and analysand, operating through experiences of futility, deadness, and hopelessness. The silence can also be seen as creating the medium for the projective identifications of the dream, stimulating both the patient’s and the analyst’s persecutory fears.