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In choosing Termination as a topic we were following our editorial blue-print of devoting one issue of Psychoanalytic Inquiry each year to a subject of central clinical interest. It appeared deceptively simple to put together an issue on so important a subject. After all, doesn't termination emerge as a dynamic consideration in every analysis (and psychotherapy). Freud had pointed to special technical problems that arise in this phase of analysis when he described setting a fixed termination date for the Wolf Man. There must then be a great deal to say about it. On the other hand, Freud had likened the termination phase of analysis to the ending of a chess game in which the moves are predictable. If this be so, is the process of termination so cut and dried or so well known that there is nothing left of interest to write about it?
In the actual plan for putting together the papers on this issue we quickly found stimulating unresolved problems to bring to the attention of our readers. First, among these problems is the criteria for termination and the accompanying issue of results. We also found disagreements about the definitions and dynamic formulations of a “phase” of analysis for which the boundaries are somewhat ill-defined. Our research for the issue carried us in another less well explored direction—the investigation of the subjective response of analyst and analysand to termination—both when there is a sense of success and of premature interruption. Rather than confirming the view implied by Freud's analogy to chess that termination seems relatively routine and familiar, we believe our authors prove the studies they have reported still have much to tell us.