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Is there anything new to be said about ending psychoanalysis? Perhaps not so much in terms of possible meanings of termination, common problems and technical viewpoints about how to handle them. And this is not Gilda de Simone's main intention with her small book, entitled Ending analysis. She has instead written an essay on time and analysis, focusing on termination. The reader gets relevant information about the ongoing discussions regarding termination and an ample list of references as well as a bibliography of works of general interest.
The book comprises 90 pages in which de Simone presents her view of psychoanalysis, influenced by kleinian theory, as an interrelating process, and its contradictory relation to time (the atmosphere of timelessness, the very strict time-frame of the session and the whole process aiming at a future ending), and the fundamental questions around personal time, separateness and death, de Simone means, that looked at in this way, there are not many specific phenomena characterising precisely the last phase of the process. After the decision to terminate the analysis has been taken, the questions about time and separateness are present from the start, whether they are thinkable or not. In consequence she is hesitant about the different “elusive” criteria for ending analysis which she refers to. But I think that what applies to criteria applies to theories in general—you must not have faith in them but still use them in order to make phenomena visible and to give them some kind of structure, i.e. meaning.
The ending is of course related to the aim, formulated by different authors in terms of a certain theoretical and technical model and a concept of mental health, more or less coloured by idiosyncrasies and ideologies, de Simone describes a change over time of criteria for terminating, from those focusing on intrapsychic variables of the patient to those mainly interested in “the mode of transformation of the analyst-patient couple”, whi