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In this essay I set out to examine Freud's views on termination, which he summarized in his lengthiest paper on technique, “Analysis Terminable and Interminable.” Freud's thoughts about the termination of analysis were both ambiguous and complex. He was less concerned with the practical problems that are entailed in bringing analysis to an end than he was with the inherent dilemma that termination, by its nature, introduces into the treatment situation. By the time this seminal paper was written (two years before his death) Freud believed that interminable analyses are invariably the product of the patient's death drive, a concept that then held center stage in Freud's thoughts about the nature of the patient's resistance to therapy. Indeed, the greatest single obstacle to successful termination is the patient's resistance to life itself. This aspect of Freud's thinking suggests an inherently existential dimension to his understanding of the analytic experience, a dimension that says as much about the human condition as it does the limitations of treatment. Though many psychoanalysts are
Dr. Thompson is Director, New School for Psychoanalysis, San Francisco; Clinical Director, Free Association Clinic for Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, San Francisco; and on the Clinical Faculty, The Wright Institute, Berkeley, California.
This article is included in the author's The Truth About Freud's Technique: The Encounter With the Real published by New York University Press, 1994.
uncomfortable with this development in Freud's later work—indeed, most have rejected it outright—I argue that it is implied from the beginning of Freud's conception of psychoanalysis and informs a central feature of its curative power.