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A.-M. Sandler: I want to wish you a very warm welcome. Before we begin what I hope will be an enjoyable and stimulating two days, I should just like to say that this Colloquium has been organized entirely by Hansi Kennedy and I am sure the success of this weekend will have been due to her inspiration.
It is my pleasure to call on Marion Burgner who will chair this morning's session and who will begin with her own introduction to the topic.
M. Burgner: In twenty minutes I can only give you a personal overview of the topic of termination. My reading of much of the literature leaves me with an abiding impression that we may be in some danger of holding fast to a book of rules, as well as seeking to mythologize the ending of an analysis into an experience of paradise lost or paradise regained.
Simpler then for me to return first to Freud's tempered and cautious injunction to his patients in the last decade of the nineteenth century. In response to their objection that he was unable to alter their external circumstances, he replied: ‘No doubt fate would find it easier than I do to relieve you of your illness. But you will be able to convince yourself that much will be gained if we succeed in transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness. With a mental life that has been restored to health, you will be better armed against that unhappiness.’ (Freud, ). Later Freud was to refine these thoughts, into the topographic al and then the structural modalities: ‘transforming what is unconscious into what is conscious’, and ‘where id was, there shall ego be’.
Freud did not consider a terminal phase as such in his work, though he described (Freud, 1918) how he brought about an ending with the Wolf Man. While advocating the timeless position of the analyst, he nonetheless describes a contrived unilateral termination, ‘a particular fixed date’, designed to overcome the patient's inertia and passivity, a negative therapeutic reaction, and a shrinking from an independent life.