You do not currently have permission to view the full text for this document. Please sign in to an account with an active subscription or contact support.
QUESTION OF TERMINATION belong to that large category of queries which are seldom made unless the questioner is already in trouble; i.e., it is not so much a question as a confession of difficulty. Ideally, termination is a natural extension of the totality and wholeness of the therapy; and, although it is true that the terms of termination might satisfy neither the therapist's nor the patient's idealizations, they should both have some intuitive feel for whether the termination is appropriate and harmonious.
The issue of termination may be approached as a problem in the therapist's aesthetics. There are some therapists who would agree with Valéry when he said of a poem, that it is never finished, it is only abandoned. There are others who take the opposite position: that every artist should have someone standing by with a mallet to hit him over the head when his painting is finished. In other words, therapy can be conceived of as having a definite end which should not be overextended; or, as having no end at all. There is an old saw that states that the therapy is finished when both therapist and patient know it is interminable. Lacan, on the other hand, has said that a therapy is finished when the patient knows what the therapist knows, which is what the patient already knew (Lacan, 1972). Every conceivable permutation and combination of position about the meaning of termination is represented in the psychoanalytic literature