On Termination

I ASSUME THAT THE PARTICIPANTS of the workshop perused the suggested reading which is quite representative of the various schools of thought. Included in the assigned reading is my paper, Reanalysis(Szalita, 1968) so I find it redundant to reiterate the criteria for termination and the problems it presents. I shall confine myself to a few thoughts I would like to share with this audience.

There are as many terminations as there are people who are being analyzed; and there are as many ways of getting analyzed. I think that there are also various ways in which each of us attempts to do analysis, particularly in those cases where the prerequisites for analyzability are not clearly present, which is often the case. To amplify briefly: analysis is a well defined method which has to be adapted to the capacity of each individual. While it is a truism to say that there are common features to all men and women in a given culture, there are also marked individual differences, to which we are often not sufficiently attuned.

It seems appropriate to omit from our present discussion all those situations when analysis is interrupted for whatever reason, in order to confine ourselves to termination proper. In those cases where analysis is indicated and proceeds in the way outlined by the technique, termination comes about in a more or less natural way. Both participants come to a conclusion that they have gone as far as they could, and both are satisfied with the results achieved. This does not happen very often, but each one of us has had such cases. We do not hear much from them or about them. They rarely get into the literature. Freud in his paper on "Analysis Terminable and Interminable", stressed, as we well remember, that the traumatic neuroses do yield such results.

Someone once said that we all analyze ourselves in others. In a sense this is very true. What is paid attention to, the inquiries made, the selection and emphasis are, perhaps, more related to our o