This paper derives from two related interests, one personal and one clinical. The primary basis of my long term interest was tied to personal history and concerns with abandonment. Early and continuous experiences with being left engendered a chronic expectation in my work with patients that they were also preparing to leave me.

Along with the fear that I would be left was the expectation that I deserved it because I was such an incompetent therapist and did so many things wrong or incorrectly. When I first became interested in this topic, the thought that relationships might be maintained with me in spite of my errors was emotionally impossible for me to accept. Such a transference to my patients often meant I was distracted from their messages to me by my own panicky responses to perceived threats of termination.

The topic of premature termination of treatment has an important place in the history of psychoanalysis. Thus while initially motivated by personal issues, I also noted that from the early