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Iam grateful for the thoughtfulness of Irene Willis's and Warren Poland's comments on my work on termination, and pleased that it has stimulated these interesting discussions. I appreciate where their positions align with mine, but will consider here challenges they point up or allude to. I also want to reflect on Poland's ideas regarding the potential of aesthetics to illuminate or deepen analytic thinking.
To begin: when a long-term open-ended treatment enters a naturally terminating process, it is for a time difficult for either patient or doctor to notice or bear it. Wanting to think more about this, I sought clues from how we understand or have expectations about stories, whether lived or imagined, as in treatment, poetry, or other narrations. I broadly assume that the matrix out of which literary and clinical crafts develop engenders shared features, just because each works as a spoken enterprise between two minds, and also, as Poland has put it well, each moves to capture some essence of persons, beyond the uttered words. Thus we may apply elements from either genre to illuminate the other.
When Willis lets us in on her experiences with crafting the endings of poems, we may be able to relate what we discover there to the problem of how others approach the reading of a therapy's ending. She discloses that when she anticipates that there can be good finishing lines to a poem in process, she feels a metaphorical petit mort—presumably a kick of real satisfaction. She also indicates that there can be a “click at the end, like the lid of a box snapping shut [that] tells me the poem is there….”1 We grant that any such creation is forever subject to further revision and so, potentially never finished—yet how well a boxlid snapped shut expresses the sense of an ending! If this effect works