In his memoir On the Move published just before his death, Oliver Sachs wrote about his nearly 50 year treatment with the New York psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold. Sachs was widely admired both as a writer and a deeply compassionate physician. His description of this “record-length” analysis makes it clear that he chose to continue not out of abject dependence but rather the thoughtful judgment that he was still benefitting from the process. One nevertheless imagines skeptics scoffing at the cliché of the interminable analysis.

That Oliver Sachs continued to find meaning as an analysand up until death does not alter the truth that psychoanalysis can have a meaningful end. That one may choose to continue does not mean that an effective ending should be dismissed. It is in fact a fundamental organizing principle of psychoanalytic treatment. The clinical and theoretical significance of the end of analysis is central to analytic work. It is not always well understood and certainly not