The present work aims to investigate the concept of silence in the history of psychoanalysis, analyzing the various meanings assigned to it in that the theories and analytical techniques were up overwriting each other. To achieve this goal, the silence was analyzed from two different theoretical perspectives, namely the classical or traditional psychoanalysis, centered in the writings of Sigmund Freud, Sándor Ferenczi and Karl Abraham and his interlocutors, and the English School of Psychoanalysis, centered the independent group and represented by the thought of Donald W. Winnicott and their theoretical heirs. At first, we attempted to find the referents of silence in his classic strand comprising it as resistance, censorship, repression, transference and countertransference, life and death drives, ego defenses, working through and the libidinal types. In the second part of this study, we sought the referent of silence through the contributions of Donald W. Winnicott from his theory of emotional development, to show how the mother is constituted as a first continent in which the baby must plunge into to development of his psyche, unconscious, self and your inner world. At the end we present four propositions of silence in current psychoanalytic practice: the silence that arises in the phenomena of withdrawal and regression, the silence of the analyst as a way to offer himself as a continent for your patient; silence as a secret in the development of thought and finally silence as interpretation and as holding.