Criteria for the Termination of Analysis1

The analytical situation can be considered as a transitional community of two people created for the purpose of changing and reintegrating the patient's internal object relationships, and thus progressively enabling him to bridge the gap between one way of life and another. On the time scale of the patient's external world, this transitional community exists for fifty minutes on a certain number of days each week. Between one session and the next there may be periods of one or more days, as well as an occasional break of some weeks or months. These periods are either arbitrarily decided upon by the analyst or patient, or are mutually arranged. In any case they are all occasions when the patient has an opportunity to experience for himself the implications of terminating analysis.

It should be remembered, however, that terminating the existence of the transitional community in the patient's social life is dynamically different from terminating the psycho-analytic process. The former is an event in the external world; the latter is the end-result of a developmental internal process.

The criteria being sought are therefore those which will enable the analyst to determine, and before that even to predict, relative to the various external forces operating on analyst and patient, the optimal moment in time when the event of termination should occur in the psycho-analytical process.

Defining the nature of a transference interpretation, James Strachey (1) wrote: 'I have suggested that it is a procedure which enables the patient, under controlled conditions and in limited doses, to employ his sense of reality for the purpose of making a comparison between his archaic and imaginary objects and his actual and real ones; and I have argued that the small-scale correction which he can thus make in his attitude towards the external world is the first step towards the internal readjustment which is our ultimate aim.'

On this basis, at any particular moment in time during the anal