The silence that listens

ethics as waiting for the unspeakable

Abstract

This paper proposes an ethical reflection on psychoanalytic listening, taking silence not as absence, but as a living presence, a time of waiting and a condition for the emergence of the unspeakable. In a current context marked by the saturation of words and the logic of efficiency, psychoanalytic practice upholds the value of the interval between what is said and saying, where

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the subject's truth can emerge without imposition. Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis, emphasized from the outset the ethical requirement that analysts must have undergone their own psychoanalysis as a prerequisite for being able to listen effectively. Jacques Lacan, the Freudian, continues to emphasize the ethics of desire, the fall of the Other, and the centrality of language as a means of accessing the formations of the unconscious, understanding listening as a place of truth production, not adaptation. Thinking of silence as an ethical act and, today, potentially subversive in the face of the commodification of suffering. In conjunction with poetry, the text brings psychoanalytic listening closer to the patience of waiting for the word that does not yet know itself.