Chapter 5: Full Silence as an Intimate Experience with Myself: A Cultural Phenomenological Hermeneutic Point of View¹

Silence constitutes a powerful field of meaning and sense construction in human experience. Although silence and speech can be understood as opposite and contradictory, both constitute phenomena where the psychological experience is developed. In silence, dialogue with internal and external voices takes place, through which decision-making and contemplation of oneself takes place. Human development involves a dialectical relationship between silence–speech and, within silence, a dialectical relationship between a noisy, contemplative, self—speaking, empty, restless and resolutive silence. Silence is where the inner language takes place, the dialogical processes between different positions of the self and the transitions of the thought are giving course to the construction of the psychological experience. The chapter seeks to understand silence as an intimate experience with one’s self through an integration between the current developments of cultural psychology and theoretical allusions of silence in hermeneutical phenomenology. The border between speech and silence is proposed as an inclusive separation, as interdependent phenomena, and the word as a frontier between two silent zones in irreversible time. Silence is proposed as the presence and internalization of the identity, which displays specific forms of language that have an impact on psychological development. Silence constitutes a space of experience in which the inner meaning develops, transits, and is absorbed by other new meanings, or expressed in speech. These psychological movements within silence act as meaning construction processes and psychological regulation in human experience, allowing the emergence of the intimate encounter of human consciousness with itself.

I have always loved the desert. You can sit on a sand dune.

You cannot see anything, you do not hear anything And yet, something shines in the silence …

—The Little Prince, Saint-Exupéry (2000)