![]() Learning to listen without speaking, understanding the importance of what we hear, and knowing that we must understand before we speak or act, are among the psychiatrist’s most important skills. The seeds of understanding that are planted in our brains during psychotherapy grow, as we quietly reflect, into a much richer and complex vision of the person rather than the illness we are treating. We know that when we listen empathically we learn things about our patients, or anyone else for that matter, that we may otherwise never have discovered. This mode of understanding, as we know well, often means listening attentively but silently. I’ve recently had a return to an earlier career role as the director of our third-year medical student psychiatry clerkship, and I’m happy that I’ve had the chance to talk with them about the value of listening empathically something they rarely hear from any other specialties. And I also, as a psychotherapist, know the value of silence in helping one to reflect and understand. As a person and as a psychiatrist as well, I, like many others, bemoan this state of affairs. ![]() Too much of the current public speech and noise, as was often the case in the 60s, seems to reverberate more within an echo chamber than between people or groups, and there sure doesn’t seem to be a lot of listening or reflecting going on in some important quarters. The world, and especially our country, has been so much noisier in the last few months than I can remember since the 1960s, and it’s often been hard to think, much less reflect. Clearly, as with any well-written poem, there are many layers of meaning if we silently reflect on Simon’s words. Later, though, he describes the isolation, sense of emptiness, the anomie, when alone and unheard, looking for a moral compass in a harsh society. Alternatively, my psychoanalytic self sees in those lines an allusion to the work done by the unconscious during sleep and dreaming. The first stanza with the first line, “Hello darkness, my old friend,” seems to express the value of being in a meditative or reflective state. In the song Sound of Silence, written when he was 21, Paul Simon reveals a complex view of silence. And in the naked light I sawTen thousand people, maybe morePeople talking without speakingPeople hearing without listeningPeople writing songs that voices never shareAnd no one daredDisturb the sound of silenceFools, said I, you do not knowSilence like a cancer growsHear my words that I might teach youTake my arms that I might reach youBut my words, like silent raindrops fellAnd echoed in the wells of silence. Hello darkness, my old friendI've come to talk with you againBecause a vision softly creepingLeft its seeds while I was sleepingAnd the vision that was planted in my brainStill remainsWithin the sound of silence.
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