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‘Malone dies.’ She said the words in a puzzled tone, looking over her father's shoulder at the book he was reading. Then Georgia, this bright 10-year-old, added, ‘If he's telling the story, how do you know he dies? Perhaps he got bored and chose to stop.’ I would guess that Gunn, a Beckett fan, would be delighted by my friend's daughter's inchoate critique. She had not yet learned the conventions of narrators and titles: that ‘comedy of’ implies marriage and ‘tragedy of’ implies death. What would one expect from a First Folio with the titles Hamlet Dies or even Romeo & Juliet Marry & Die? In psychoanalytic case history, whether analyst-perspective or patient-perspective, the conventions are still unsettled. There is an anxiety in Gunn's title. Wool-gathering alone would be too enigmatic: seeing it in the Psychoanalysis section, one would imagine it was mis-filed from Crafts. My Analysis would be too stark, even if it implied an ending. So the ‘How’ promises the means and since the term is in the subtitle one infers that ‘wool-gathering’ was how/the way the analysis ended. The active voice of ‘I Ended’ implies it was the author's decision alone, and that we will learn the deepest reason for this. How My Analysis Ended or even How We, My Analyst and I, Ended My Analysis would be different authorial promises. Does the author fulfil the promise of his title? Not quite and so we are left wishing he had made the other promises.
The psychoanalytic case history is an intrinsically difficult form, which emphasizes the Aristotelian narrative elements — plot, character, diction, thought, song and spectacle — in an innovative way. There is rarely much of an (external) plot of the Tender is the Night kind and there is an evasion or at least incompleteness about character. The greatest writers avoid tagging characters but rather aspire, like George Eliot, to show each person as an ‘equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference’