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It is not usual to find psychoanalytical literature on the interruption of treatments, and yet such a study can illuminate the otherwise dark spectrum of analytical technique as well as psychopathology. The paucity of papers of this nature can perhaps be explained by our desire to be optimistic about our task and keep hoping that we have the capacity and the tools to carry a treatment through to a good ending. What constitutes a good ending is, of course, a debatable subject, but an interrupted analysis certainly is not, and it therefore leaves us troubled in our desire to cure or at least to understand. I shall return to this subject later on. In thinking about an interrupted analysis from a medical standpoint, however, if we find that a certain number of patients suffering from an illness do not recover, it is not an indication that the treatment or the doctor is not good, but rather a manifestation of just one possible outcome.
With this attitude, I would like to approach the subject of the interruption of an analysis of a patient presenting a perversion. If we include the case I am going to present here among the cases of therapeutic failure in perverse patients, we shall be better able to reflect on the causes. I do not want to appear to lack humility, but I am indeed encouraged to remember Freud's elaboration of Dora's interruption of her treatment with him, and his description of the failed treatment of his female homosexual patient (Freud, 1905, 1920).
Studying the material after the break-off of the treatment led me to an interesting though paradoxical finding: namely, that while the patient evidenced that a functional dream work was taking place in his mind and narrated the dreams in session, there was a sabotage against insight and psychic change that rendered the dream interpretation useless. It was not that