Learning about the ideal outcome of psychoanalysis has been viewed as the optimum strategy for understanding positive mental health (Jahoda 1955). Here psychoanalysts' descriptions of their ideal of patients at the end of psychoanalysis are compared with psychoanalysts? descriptions of real patients at the end of psychoanalysis with terminations mutually agreed on by analysts and analysands, with and without maximum benefit, as a way of understanding more about the goals of psychoanalysis and analysts? views of positive mental health.

Forty-four members of the American Psychoanalytic Association each described one patient using the Shedler-Westen Assessment