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This is a small and yet very impressive book. Ending analysis is an extremely important area of work. Its very nature means that knowledge in this area is not available to the student during psychodynamic training. Of course, theory can be read but to experientially and affectively feel the subject when one is in the middle of one's own analysis and the work of one's training patients is probably nearly impossible. This, then, is essential work in training that can really only be left beyond the end of training and to be perceived in the very ending of one's own analysis. This is a problem that Gilda de Simone uncovers in swift decisive chapters, which do not give space for any ‘rules of ending’. Instead thinking is opened up to examine many essential analytic conundrums, all of which suffuse the final movement of the work with the patient.
Ending analysis is examined around the central paper of ‘Psychoanalysis Terminable and Interminable’ (Freud 1937). Early in the book Freud's pessimism is contrasted with Ferenczi's optimism (Ferenczi 1927). Various theories are spun for the reader, with ideas moving from early analytic theory as solution to conflict, to the complexities of the patient-analyst dyad, transference and countertransference. All the while ‘Nachtraglichkeit’, the reworking of every psychic experience in the light of new experiences and access to further development, is a core argument in relation to thinking about the ending.
In the book, technique is considered in relation to theories. Who decides the ending? Freud famously terminated the Wolfman's treatment and this is examined in relation to so-called difficult cases. Today it is standard for the patient and analyst together to analyse and understand the meaning of the ending, so that this can be found together. There is a beautiful quote by Wittgenstein (1931) in his ‘Notes on Frazer's Golden Bough’: ‘The awakening of the intellect takes place with the separation from the original soil, the original f