*A Commentary on the Fully-Analyzed Person

By consensus, one of the most ambivalent areas of the practice of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy are the final goals of treatment. No psychotherapist seems to be able to say definitively when a psychotherapy should stop — when the promise of humanity through psychic intervention has been fulfilled. People returning for refreshers to psychotherapy are becoming so frequent that the endpoint of the process is now in this way being called into question. In related areas, one of the deeper and less known aspects of general medicine is the fact that many patients do come on and off for treatment for their lifetime and, furthermore, that physicians unconsciously encourage such a longitudinal health style. One has only to consult the case files in dermatology, allergy, internal medicine and similar medical specialties to see that this is so. Psychotherapy, on the other hand, proclaims as one of its maxims that the patient should not come for consultation one moment more than he needs to, and governs itself strictly according to the principles of parsimony. It in fact lives in dread of interminable analysis! It may perhaps be that the refractoriness of mental problems, and the indigenous resistance of patients to the cure, obtrude upon the need for parsimony. But, it is interesting to note, few statistics are available as to just how long patients do persist in psychotherapy, how many need later to return, and how many even clandestinely seek a second or third therapist in their lifetime after the primary treatment has been completed. Burton1 reports from other sources the remarkable case of a woman who has been in analysis for 21 years with three highly reputable psychoanalysts and is apparently still not cured.

Final states of existence arrived at through treatment procedures require proper linguistic notations as well as indigenous symbolizations to characterize them. Thus a study of the literature revealed that whatever the endpoints of psychotherapy are