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The criteria for the ending of an analysis are an important problem in every psycho-analyst's mind. There are a number of criteria on which all of us would agree. Here I shall suggest a different approach to this problem.
It has often been observed that the termination of an analysis reactivates in the patient earlier situations of parting, and is in the nature of a weaning experience. This implies, as my work has shown me, that the emotions felt by the baby at weaning time, when early infantile conflicts come to a head, are strongly revived towards the end of an analysis. Accordingly, I arrived at the conclusion that before terminating an analysis I have to ask myself whether the conflicts and anxieties experienced during the first year of life have been sufficiently analysed and worked through in the course of the treatment.
My work on early development2 has led me to distinguish between two forms of anxiety: persecutory anxiety, which is predominant during the first few months of life and gives rise to the 'paranoid-schizoid position', and depressive anxiety, which comes to a head at about the middle of the first year and gives rise to the 'depressive position'. I arrived at the further conclusion that at the beginning of his postnatal life the infant is experiencing persecutory anxiety both from external and internal sources: external, in so far as the experience of birth is felt as an attack inflicted on him; and internal, because the threat to the organism, which, according to Freud, arises from the death instinct, in my view stirs up the fear of annihilation—the fear of death. It is this fear which I take to be the primary cause of anxiety.
Persecutory anxiety relates mainly to dangers felt to threaten the ego; depressive anxiety relates to dangers felt to threaten the loved object, primarily through the subject's aggression. Depressive anxiety arises through synthetic processes in the ego; for as a result of growing integration, love and hatred and, ac