Far from being an impediment to psychotherapy, silence has a significance and value which make it an essential ally of speech in the therapeutic process. This is a slightly revised version of a paper presented at the ISPS Conference held in Manchester in September 2004By putting silence back within the orbit of language this paper avoids the categorical mistakes in our understanding of this phenomenon, which are common in the literature. Contemporary attempts in psychotherapy to reinstate a value to silence have misunderstood it and imbued it with quasi mystical qualities.*. Without philosophy, psychoanalysis can given no very coherent account of silence. This paper aims to show that philosophy may supply a more adequate understanding of silence in clinical practice than has hitherto been possible. Psychoanalysis has understood silence either as a defence, a symptom or as a necessary punctuation, but it is more intensely a part of language than these explanations would suggest. The research ends with recommendations and suggestions for further study. The present study also demonstrates the significant role of Pakistani literature in general that attempts to resist the violence regardless of any differences. The selected poems expose the relation between discourse and power, authority, domination and hegemony.

This study highlights the chaos, fear and anxiety of the current age that is manifested in the poems, moreover, it shows the uncertainty caused by modern scientific warfare it is no more certain when and where one is going to die.

The current study also applies Foucault’s theoretical concept of bio power through discourse who coined this term in his The Will to Knowledge in 1988. Ghose is a globally recognized Pakistani English poet and his poetry is enriched with pathos, sorrows and resistance against destruction caused due to the domination of modern metanarratives, such as progress, nationalism or political objectives. This paper endeavors to analyze Zulfikar Ghose’s selected poems All in a Lifetime and Silent Birds in light of Jean Francois Lyotard’s theory of Postmodernism that was proposed in 1979.

Alcestis painting the silent patient