On analytic endings

In the many and varied stories of how analyses come to an end, we have maintained a psychoanalytic mythology about that which has come to be called “Termination.”

However, what to one analyst is a completed analysis, to another is not. Since Freud’s (1937) “Analysis Terminable and Interminable,” psychoanalysts have described many different criteria: the removal of restrictive and pathological defences, evolving into the integration and plasticity of defensive systems (Norman et al. 1976), the internalization of a self-analysing function and the ability to do self-analysis (Busch 2009), or of warded off affects and thoughts (Weiss 1993), the capacity to experience and “think” about oneself (Caper 1999). No one set of ideas or goals has emerged across different analytic schools of thought as the necessary or sufficient accomplishment marking when an analysis can end “successfully.” The idea of the analyst as a real, three-dimensional object largely replacing the transference phantasy (ies) when an analysis is nearing an end has also been suggested (Firestein 1982), also as seen in dreams (Hebbrecht 2013; Meltzer 1983; Quinodoz 1999). This comes with the notion of the resolution of the transference neurosis and its resolution (Calef 1971; Firestein 1982; Loewald 1971; Norman et al. 1976).

Psychoanalysts have described the mourning, weaning and grieving process that occurs at the end of analysis (Blum 1987; Meltzer 1967). A number of psychoanalysts also suggest that there is a recrudescence of the specific symptoms from the earliest part of the analysis when treatment comes to an end.

Many of these ideas are clinically observable and are still part of our lexicon, though with less certainty and they have become less of a requirement to deem an analysis successful.

The Analyst at Work section provides a space for taking a closer look at some actual clinical practices.

On the occasion of her 90th birthday, in London, Betty Joseph presented a brief paper called “Ending Analysis