'Open End' Technique in Psychoanalysis

Resumption of analysis for brief or longer periods is a common practice. Freud long ago suggested that all analysts might profit from brief periodic resumptions of personal analysis. Analysts have always realized that analysis is a continuous process if only because in their work they are obliged at every step to analyze their countertransference. To forward this concept, the term 'open end'1 technique was coined and introduced to the discussion of technique.

It is the aim of psychoanalysis to interpret and resolve the transference neurosis in the terminal phase of analysis. This should not interfere with the patient's need for an indefinite continuation of his analysis by himself and occasionally by analytic interviews with his former or a new analyst. I have referred to this technique occasionally as 'supervision of continuous self-analysis'.

The term and the technique of the open end procedure gives the patient or the former student of psychoanalysis a sense of obligation and inner urgency to allow the analytic process to continue. The term implies that some libido is transferred from the person of the analyst to the process of further analytic introspection.

Emphasis on the open end technique is specially indicated in the analytic training situation. Even the most careful, consistent, and conscientious transference interpretation by the training analyst must at times meet with special difficulties in the proper analytic interpretation of negative transference phenomena in his students who, after all, by the choice of their profession have a more intense identification with their analyst than the average patient. Many students of psychoanalysis go through episodes when they want to become analysts just like their analysts. Such trend for identification may find its counterpart in the countertransference of the training analyst, and with all due respect for the power of transference interpretation by the training analyst, a part of this transference