How Silence Contributes to the Performance of Sincerity in Psychotherapy

Abstract

Most literature concerning silence in psychotherapy has focused on the meaning of silences, particularly from psychoanalytic perspectives, and is based on clinical experience rather than empirical studies. These authors tend to interpret silence as pathology or resistance in the client and/or advise clinicians to be especially tolerant of silence and to avoid filling silences. Although some studies have found that moderate silence is correlated with better outcomes, these studies ignore psychosocial aspects of the interaction. No research has looked at silence in psychotherapy as a linguistic device to manage the local sequential environment. Silence following an initiating action is characteristic of dispreferred responses such as refusals and negatively valenced answers in general conversation. In this study, we used conversation analysis to explore preference and the role of silence in nine spiritually oriented humanistic psychotherapy sessions. We found that in contrast to everyday conversation, in these interactions, there is a preference for gaps and pauses while immediate responses are dispreferred.

Editorial: Valuing Indigenous Voices Despite the “No” Vote

“…An exclusive look at the use of the Circle of Security as an attachmentbased model for supervision (Soliman, 2023), a conversation analysis on the preferential use of silence in humanistic psychotherapy sessions (Berger & Rae, 2023), and a literature review on the benefits of dog-assisted therapy for children with anxiety (Wu & Wei, 2023) are other articles displaying the journal's focus on original and wide-ranging research. Greer White's (2023) book review of Psychopathology of the Situation in Gestalt Therapy: A Field-Oriented Approach (Spagnuolo Lobb & Cavaleri, 2023) caps off this compelling issue.…”