Frozen Time and Endless Analyses: A Response to David Tresan's ‘Thinking Individuation Forward’

In ‘Thinking individuation forward’, David Tresan suggests that, despite Jung's insistence on the finite nature of the analytical process and the need to separate from the analyst if an analysand is to fully individuate, the concept of individuation as developed by Jung and elaborated by Joseph Henderson can be extended and utilized to justify analyses that continue after individuation has been achieved and after the resolution of the transference. According to Tresan, these analysands who continue to work actively in analysis long after the goals of the process have been achieved and the normal time boundaries have been transcended, represent a new class of analysands. He hypothesizes that such analyses constitute ‘a kind of continuing life education of the most profound and individualized sort’ (p. 19), and that therefore it is theoretically justifiable to continue indefinitely until, presumably, they are brought to a close by the death of one or other of the participants.

Tresan's somewhat provocative suggestion, although disquieting in its denial of the temporality of the analytical process, has the undeniable merit of directing our attention towards a problem that has attracted little interest in Jungian circles, namely the problem of the terminability or interminability of analysis, a problem that has serious and important theoretical, clinical and ethical implications.

The question of the interminability of analysis is intimately connected with the problem of temporality and the different ways in which we experience time. It also raises two very different, but equally difficult, questions: how can we confront and deal with the interminability of the analysis of those patients who present disturbances in sense of time; and whether, as Tresan seems to be arguing, there is something in the structure of analysis itself that calls for, even determines, interminability.

In order to answer these questions, it is necessary to look at the way we think about time in gener