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I'm happy to have been asked to be a part of this issue devoted to a consideration of the concept and process of the termination phase in psychoanalysis. I'm especially intrigued at the prospect of revisiting, with my respected colleagues, a topic that I, along with my coauthor, Morton Shane, had thought about and had researched in the psychoanalytic literature more than twenty years ago (Shane & Shane, 1984). The publication that emerged from our efforts contained a review of all of the literature on the termination phase published to date in psychoanalytic journals of interest to us, that is, journals related to the American Psychoanalytic Association and the International Psychoanalytic Association. A relatively complete review of articles concerning this subject was possible because, as Jody Davies (2005), reminds us, the idea of a termination phase was only invented by Edward Glover in his 1955 paper published in the Journal of the American Psychological Association, and it wasn't much talked about in the literature until the ‘70s. By the time my coauthor and I were researching termination in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, however, it had already become a popular topic, though ideas about it were fairly uniform, at least in the literature we explored. In fact, the formulations on the ending phase of analysis were so narrow in scope that it was possible for us to organize in a rather short list all the criteria for initiating the termination process identified in these publications. These criteria included, most importantly, the resolution of the transference neurosis; the successful completion of the mourning process, including mourning the loss of the analyst; the ability to separate from and function apart from the analyst; and the development of a newfound or more adequately refined capacity for self-analysis. All of this signified, according to accepted lore, that the infantile strivings that had impeded the patient's development and that had th