Time is a River Without Banks: A Response to Connolly's ‘Frozen Time and Endless Analyses’

I was chilled by my first reading of Connolly's response but soon warmed again, in the sense of finding myself a little heated. On writing about long term analyses, I knew I was challenging a shibboleth of all analytic schools, and I thought I might be criticized for being pecuniary and blind to my own power needs, but I did not anticipate that my piece and my work were so severely tainted by my ‘separation anxieties and refusal of incompleteness and death’, my unconscious ‘return to an evolutionary level of relationship dominated by a dual unity with the figure of the other [a primitive narcissistic symbiosis?]’, my having become ‘caught in the frozen time of [my] analysands’, avoiding the ‘struggle and the capacity to accept the partial nature of any analytical process’, ignorant of my inability ‘to leave’ and lack of ‘willingness to be left’.

It seems to me that there are at least a couple of fallacies in the picture drawn by Connolly. I thought I stated rather clearly that my intention was to explore a phenomenon that has been extant and ignored for a long time in the analytic world, to understand what was actually happening at a metapsychological as well as at a clinical level in open-ended analyses, and to seek the intrinsic rationale that seem to justify them. I did not create such events nor did I set out to advocate their practice except, of course, when they are indicated as I now see they sometimes are.