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As claimed by Jones,1 Freud was probably referring to Analysis Terminable and Interminable (1937a) in his letter to Max Eitingon dated February 5th 1937 when he described what he was doing: grappling with a ≪brief technical essay≫ that was ≪slowly taking shape≫.2 This is an accurate image of the movement Freud was creating in his work and which, in literature, we can experience directly. A vast amount has been written on this relatively short but dense essay, which was the main subject of the XXXV IPA Congress . It suffices to mention the countless papers in the volume edited by J. Sandler (1991), Pfeffer's report (1963), Blum's writings (1987) and those by Berenstein (1987).
I would like to limit myself to pointing out some of the factors that might have contributed to its ≪taking shape≫ and the structure of the paper that ensued. By connecting An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938) and Moses and Monotheism (1933-38), I will then put forward several conjectures about the role the vicissitudes of the psychoanalytical movement at the time played in the ≪growth≫ of these works, or at least consider them as the background. This is worthwhile doing, if we keep in mind what Leupold-Löwenthal (1991) says, ≪We have no (published) documentary evidence of the importance that Freud himself attached to Analysis Terminable and Interminable≫ (262).
Amongst all Freud's works, the position Green (1991, 149) gives this paper is of great importance: ≪Analysis Terminable and Interminable may be regarded as one panel of a triptych which, taken as a whole, forms Freud's testament. While An Outline of Psychoanalysis (1938, unfinished) brings together the essential points of psychoanalytical