“Now We're Out of Time”: Thoughts on Endings in Poetry and Psychoanalysis

Ending is one of the greatest of all human concerns.

The body dies; the body's beauty lives.

So evenings die, in their green going,

A wave, interminably flowing.

The process of ending an analysis begins before the analyst and patient meet. The weightiness of the ending is felt in the fact of entering into a relationship knowing that it will be time-limited. The point of psychoanalysis is not to make a friend or to find a partner, but to engage in deepening work for an unknown period of time, to create room inside oneself to think through whatever the trouble was that led one to analysis, and along the way, to build an enduring relationship inside to which one can refer for the rest of one's life. The only way to do the work is to form an intimate relationship, and then to end it. While the connection continues internally, as a past experience and as an ongoing resource, actual meetings in the external world end. In the experience of parting, there are added levels of understanding that cannot happen during the ongoing work, but that only come about through the process of saying goodbye. Because of being finite, psychoanalysis heightens the intensity of experience in a way that can add to transformative growth.

For the poet, there is a different relation to ending, but one that may have elements that can enrich psychoanalytic thinking. The end of the poem arrives out of the necessity of an aesthetic satisfaction, a form. The poet terminates each piece of