Group Discussions

THE GROUP DEFINED ITS TASK as attempting to recount from personal experiences with termination, some of the issues we have met, with particular emphasis on how we would ideally like the process of analytic termination to go. We have all terminated analysis as analysands. Why look to our patients and to the literature for "issues" of termination, when we were once the "issue"? (Nachmani.) Theoretical and abstract issues were seen as secondary to our primary task of sharing our experiences with each other. The issue of an analytic relationship never having been adequately formed is not an infrequent factor involved in termination, in that analyst and analysand never get into a "good enough" trusting relationship. It is crucial that the patient forms an "attachment" to the analyst and vice versa in some way (Schecter), and without this underpinning of "authentic relatedness" (Feiner), a process misnamed "analysis" proceeds for years in so-called "attached" form until both quietly despair and bring up the issue of termination (Schecter).

There was agreement about the discontinuous nature of change and growth, and that analysis, as a change process, is also a discontinuous one. The terminal experience as a phase of analysis was seen as being as unique as the process itself. We emphasized the need to cover the same ground many times, and hence the need perhaps for a second analysis, to integrate what remains unfinished in the first. The post-analytic period was also seen as a time of going over old ground and integrating the experience of the analysis proper.

The group consensus about the process of termination focused on the necessity for confronting the patient with the reality of his life situation, and then leaving it to the patient to decide what he wanted to do. All agreed that the patient's subjective experience of termination should not be one of being "kicked out, " that such an experience may leave the patient with painful damage to his sense of self-est