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Through the lens of endings, Schlesinger has provided an exposition of the transformational process that occurs in the conduct of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. Schlesinger, with over 50 years of experience, is the Director of Clinical Psychology in the Department of Psychiatry at Columbia, and a training/supervising analyst at the Columbia Center for Psychoanalytic Training in New York City. In this very readable and insightful book Schlesinger reveals the inner workings of psychoanalytic therapy as conducted by fresh young psychoanalysts in training, on one hand, as well as by seasoned old hands with decades of experience, on the other. Endings and Beginnings develops the perspective that the instrumental quality of therapy to effect change occurs through a succession of cycles of beginnings and intermittent endings that corkscrew a course through the analytic process from the initiation into therapy, through the transference neurosis, until the ultimate termination. Abundant clinical material is presented to support his thesis that recognizing the occurrence of endings and sharing that recognition with the analysand through patiently timed empathic interpretation enables the forward momentum of the therapy that safeguards its instrumental capability to impact change and shield the therapy from evolving into the stasis of a relationship that exists for its own sake, leading either to impasse or walled off from the possibility of achieving personal autonomy. By attending to the many mini-endings the therapy can progress to a classic termination of mutual agreement with all the psychological benefits that it may afford versus terminations for external causes that miss the opportunity to maturely manage object loss.
Schlesinger teaches us that termination is too important an issue to be left unexplored to the end of therapy, and the focus on it is necessary right from the beginning to assess whether an individual can successfully undertake the rigors