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Saying Goodbye is a collection of ten case reports and six theoretical papers that relate either directly or tangentially to the issue of termination in child and adolescent psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. The idea of preparing a book on termination grew out of a conference held by the Association for Child Psychoanalysis in March of 1989. It is not clear whether this book is a collection of papers written for the conference or a collection of papers invited for inclusion in a volume inspired by the issues discussed at the conference. The book focuses on issues involving termination in the psychoanalysis and psychotherapy of children ranging in age from early childhood to late adolescence, and diagnostically from neurotic patients in analysis to severely disturbed patients in a variety of psychotherapies.
“Why should there be a book on termination rather than on more specific clinical issues of diagnosis, treatment, or different techniques with different diagnostic groups of patients? As in adult treatment, termination brings about a new focus of conflicts that reemerge, and are replayed at the end of treatment. For the patient, termination may represent graduation, death of the analyst, death of the helpless patient himself or herself, or castration. Reactions to and reaction formations against all these issues may be expressed. For the analyst, termination is a highly conflicted issue involving fears of letting go, conflict over pride and success, unrecognized or unresolved attachment to one's patients, to one's analyst, and to one's parents.
Unlike the situation in adult analysis, the issue of the relationship between the parent of the patient and the analyst is often brought to a crisis during the termination period. Parents may cause a premature interruption of treatment because of competition