The End of an Analysis

After several years of analysis, an analysand could clearly identify her anxiety about ending the analysis, without however stating the reasons for this possible termination. When she said, “I have built my life”, one could hear, through this moment of denouement and these sessions, a barely perceptible statement: “I don't know what I can still analyse, but I cannot leave you.” She did not want to break off this relationship with the analyst because it strongly reactivated a relationship to the “maternal other” and would, in addition, be taking one step further towards “being an analyst”, which was what she had in mind, but could not yet authorise herself to do. Envisaging a tangible term for the analysis a few months earlier had led to a resurgence of symptoms, to an unexpected episode of depression: how could this sudden emergence of such a sensation of breakdown be explained except by throwing light on the impediment contained in the planned termination of the sessions? It was impossible to stop the analysis in such a situation, the analyst told her clearly. The patient replied: “You are not helping me much to separate from you. What do I need to work on in order to help me negotiate the separation?”. The mysteries of these ambivalent tendencies need to be explored in their different possible forms.

If the notion of the end of analysis has given rise to multiple contributions in the literature, it is difficult to find an approach to it in a dictionary of psychoanalysis, since a potential definition implies, if we think about carefully, a whole set of analytic concepts that themselves need to be defined. This question amounts to a tautology: it remains a question, raising by its very essence different scenarios referring to the analyst's clinical intuition, which is itself caught up in a constellation of theoretical elements.

It is worth recalling the famous ambiguity highlighted by Freud, which served him as inspiration for the following joke: “Analysis is terminat