Recapitulation and Conclusions

There are several reasons why I felt it appropriate to write this book. One was my wish to communicate my past and present experience as a psychoanalyst confronted each day with a register of feelings of which the analytic relationship is capable of making sense. Another was the idea that such a project might satisfy a need, because to my knowledge there is not yet any general work which sets out the various psychoanalytic viewpoints on this crucial aspect of the psychoanalytic process.

I believe that such a work may also be of interest to all who have recourse to psychoanalytic thought in their practice—for instance, psychotherapists, who also encounter the phenomena of separation anxiety in both individual and group therapies. Finally, I am addressing all who face the challenge of the anxiety aroused by solitude and mourning, to tell them what the psychoanalytic experience in the therapeutic setting can offer. The clinical examples are intended not only as a demonstration to psychoanalysts of how theory and technique in my view combine but also to create an awareness in people with little or no acquaintance with psychoanalytic concepts, giving them a living insight into the exchanges between analysand and analyst whereby this affective evolution becomes possible.

It is very difficult to express in words the result of the transformations which we observe in psychoanalytic therapy and which eventually induce the analysand to contemplate terminating his analysis because he feels able to leave his analyst and continue on his own. Winnicott succeeded in conveying this idea when he wrote that the capacity to be ‘alone in the presence of someone’ is an essential component of psychical maturity (1958). Changes in the experience of solitude do indeed constitute a barometer of affective evolution and of the level of psychical

integration attainable, both during each individual's psychical development and in the course of the psychoanalytic process, as