Stumbling towards Termination in Clinical and Theoretical Psychoanalysis: A Commentary on ‘Stumbling towards Termination’1

When Dominique Scarfone, the editor of ‘The Analyst at Work’ section, asked me to have another look at Mayer Subrin's paper and the commentaries of Ilany Kogan and Nilde Jacob Parada Franch, I reread Dr Scarfone's introductory editorial (Scarfone, 2008) as a guide to how I should proceed. My brief is twofold: on the one hand, I am to listen with a ‘clinical ear’ to what my colleagues have written, and, on the other, I am called upon to abstract a meta-commentary. Faced with problems of language and of the level of discourse (clinical, theoretical, and differences in clinical vertex), I realized that my task would comprise a kind of transcription, rather than translation, in abstract and general terms — because theoretical and thematic (subjects, hypotheses, and theories concerning the termination) — of descriptions, representations, and personal and therefore limited and particular appraisals. I would be required not only to present a clear-cut, personal, theoretical and clinical reading, but to transform the ‘fact’ of the texts sent to me — that is, other people's thoughts — into the representation of a discourse, namely a discourse of general applicability on the termination of analysis. My attention was therefore focused not on Dr Subrin's case history itself but on the relationship between the case history and the commentaries, with a view to demonstrating to the best of my ability its characteristic dialogic and dialectical quality. Underlying my attempt is the idea advanced by Winnicott (1965) that psychoanalysis, as research, is a collective enterprise, and that it is such not because of the (extremely partial) repeatability and confirmability of the relevant phenomena and procedures, but on account of the impossibility of defining a clear limit to its field. Because the psychic field produces itself, whereas one seeks to reproduce it in descriptions and theories, a very great number of observation points located apart in different spaces and times are requir