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I was pleased to receive the invitation to comment on Dr Subrin's clinical material in the ‘The Analyst at Work’ section of the International Journal of Psychoanalysis. I find this section, whose important purpose is to advance psychoanalytic communication across psychoanalytic schools, interesting and intriguing.
In his work, Dr Subrin presents clinical material from a sub-phase of termination, with musings on termination prior to the selection of a specific date for termination, and culminating with a record of the last week of analysis. As I, too, have explored the subject of termination (Kogan, 1996), the theme illustrated in Dr Subrin's article Stumbling towards termination is of special interest to me.
Dr Subrin's account impressed me with its frankness and admirable sincerity. I was also impressed by the holding ability of a sensitive analyst who accompanied his patient on a long and painful analytic journey, and by his contact with the patient's unconscious, as described in this fine work. However, I found the task I was asked to undertake quite difficult. In examining my reactions to Dr Subrin's interesting material, I discovered that engaging in a form of creative reflection by placing myself in the analyst's chair and allowing my associations to lead me in one direction or another creates the temptation to do the analyst's job in a different, ‘better’ way. Humorously referring to this temptation, Gardner states: “Whenever one analyst tells his or her work to another, it is tempting to the told analyst to tell the telling analyst what the telling analyst might have seen, could have seen, should have seen, might have done, could have done, should have done” (1984, p. 39). I, too, found myself caught up in this temptation.
I am also aware that to comment on somebody else's sessions without knowing much about the work done by both patient and analyst in their long analytic journey, and without being acquainted with the nuances, hidden messages, and relevant omis