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Although there is perhaps no such thing as a completed analysis, most patients do, sooner or later, stop coming to analysis. Perhaps we, as analysts, are handicapped in knowing all about what ending feels like, for by the mere fact of becoming analysts we have succeeded in bypassing an experience which our patients have to go through. We have chosen to identify ourselves with our analyst's profession and to act out that identification — a thing which our patients on the whole are not able to do. But we have to manage as best we can; and here is an attempt to describe what no longer coming to analysis meant to one particular patient.
This ending was not something which happened as a logical result of the patient's being considered cured; in fact, the ending preceded the cure by many months, for it was not until the analysis had actually stopped that the symptom began to move at all.
The patient, an unmarried woman of 33, had had a headache since the age of 13. When she was sent to me, the diagnosis had been hysteria with a hypochondriacal under-layer. Her own description of the headache was that it was like a black cloud or fog that separated her from everything and penetrated into her brain, making her utterly incapable.
She had had three years' analysis with another member of the Society, and was approaching the end of her second year with me when the question of termination was raised. She maintained persistently that the headache was no better, that she was utterly bored in her work, and could never hope for a better job as she was untrained; also that the money available for her analysis had almost run out. All this was true, with the further difficulty that I had too