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After recalling the opposition between silence and noise, and the societal evolution of their reciprocal relationship, the author underlines the role of silence in discourse which, far from being a blank, sculpts speech. From birth to adolescence, children learn to remain silent while learning to speak, spontaneously but also under the influence of their family and social environment and life experiences, or even their instinctual drive life. Democracy, whether general, school or family democracy, has liberated the speech of children and adolescents. Fundamentally intersubjective, silence is also the absence of communication and, figuratively speaking, the absence of news. Silence in clinical practice is related to silence under the constraint of pressure or under the effect of inhibition and other defence mechanisms. Clinical vignettes illustrate these dimensions. While psychotherapy seeks to free speech in order to overcome silence, it can sometimes accommodate a shared silence that lets the setting speak.