The Effect of Postanalytic Contact

When we have engaged with our patients in the intense exploration that analysis affords, we, as well as our patients, experience feelings of loss when the treatment ends. In addition to whatever particular meaning the specific patient holds for the specific analyst, there is always the loss of knowing what the future will hold for our patients and what part our analytic work will play in life after we no longer meet. We are curious. That's part of being analysts. We do not initiate later contact. That's also part of being analysts. We try to monitor our personal needs. Some patients would welcome our contacting them, but others would not. My follow-up studies tell me that we are not always so accurate in predicting whether this later contact will be welcome. Patients themselves may think one thing at termination and another later on. It is up to our former patients whether we learn about their lives. So I have pursued my curiosity about what happens later by conducting follow-up studies (Kantrowitz et al. 1986, 1987a,b, , 1990a,b,c; Kantrowitz 1993), in an attempt to understand what works well, what doesn't, and how it plays out in the specifics of the particular patient and particular analyst. Most recently I have been exploring how former patients think about the termination phase of their treatment and what happened afterward. We know a lot about what analysts think, but we don't so often have the voices of former patients.

What I would wish is to have the voices of both patient and analyst on their experience together, but the intrusion on the analysis, including the possibility of the analyst's saying something that was not said at all to the patient, or saying something in a way different from how it had been understood during the analysis, could be disruptive. So probably the closest we can come to knowing both parts of an analytic experience is when our patients return, tell us about what has happened since we've last seen them, how they have thought about us