Stumbling towards Termination

I have found it useful to track the unfolding of an analysis from the opening phase founded on the creation of the therapeutic alliance, to the midphase engagement in and out of the transference of the central organizing fantasies, to the final ending, or termination phase begun in response to an awareness that change has taken place. ‘Stumbling towards termination’ is a subphase of termination. Termination has been contemplated but a specific date has not yet been chosen. When does it occur to the analyst that termination is possible, when to the patient? A sorting out takes place: what has changed, what has not, what has yet to be done, what will be left undone or for another time. It is to better understand ‘stumbling towards termination’ that I present this specific material, which begins with the musings on termination before a specific date was selected, culminating with a record of the last week of the analysis.

The patient had been in analysis with me for 13 years. She had presented herself to her first analyst as depressed, suicidal, thinking of killing herself by stabbing herself in the abdomen with a kitchen knife after undergoing two abortions, for lack of financial support from her husband and extended family. She fled the couch in that first analysis mid-analytic hour, telling the analyst she was leaving to further her professional education, but in fact she feared she would not be able to control her sexual impulses toward him which would ‘destroy his family.’ Following her first analytic appointment with me, as she drove home that evening in the dark, she ran into a tree, at a location where she knew a professional person of her own ethnic background had driven off the road into a pool of water and drowned.

In the 12th year of her analysis, termination was in the air but a date had not yet been set. In recalling the last hour before my usual Christmas/New Year's break, it became clear that during this period of ‘stumbling towards termination,’ every se