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This study is about post-termination recollections of their analyses by 34 practicing analysts, 30 from the Boston Psychoanalytic Institute and four from outside that area. Several questions guided the research: “success” of analysis; the role of gender; attitudes of the analyst toward the analysand; what attributes of the analyst were linked to change; post-analytic contacts with the analyst; and whether practice theories at the time affected the analytic experience. The total number of analyses studied was 64 because 28 of the 34 participants had two or more analyses. Gender effects were studied by comparing same-sex and opposite-sex analyst-patient dyads.
The research protocol included 13 penetrating questions, which were sent to potential participants in preparation for interviews. For example, “How would you describe the inner presence of your analyst around the time of termination; how did that change over the years; how is that now?” And, “What forms of loving and/or hating, missing or desiring, wanting to be loved, or to be appreciated and respected by your analyst continue to have their momentum, and how? Did you and do you now have fantasies or wishes for some sort of eventual friendship with your analyst? Did you have longings to empathically know the flux of your analyst's own inner emotional life and do you now?” (p. 321)
Taped interviews lasted two to eight hours, as questions were explored in detail. Confidentiality was protected by participants' choosing their own code names, reviewing their transcripts for consent to publish, and being able to delete sensitive material and identifying data. After transcription, all tapes were destroyed to avoid voice recognition.
Once transcribed and tabulated, the responses were grouped into three categories: degree of retrospective satisfaction with the analysis; gender combination effects; and the decade in which the analysis took place.
25 or 39% of the 64 analyses were described as deeply sati