EPILOGUE

Based on her research study, “Mourning Analysis: The Post-Termination Phase” (2002), Heather Craige provides us with a picture of the complexities of termination and mourning of analysis, including the risks that accompany this phase, and gives us recommendations about the ending process. In keeping with a traditional emphasis placed on mourning as a sine qua non of the termination process, Craige notes that 94% of her 121 subjects, that is, analysands who had completed psychoanalysis, mourned the loss of their analysts. She concludes that mourning the loss of the analytic relationship is nearly a universal process. The mourning process, however, will have distinctly personal meanings for each analysand that, at times, may be related to the reactivation of earlier traumatic experience. We wonder as to the meanings that termination had for those who did not mourn. Did it reflect, for example, a less intense involvement, an individual with a more secure attachment pattern, or the impact of an analyst's different theoretical model of analysis that emphasized post-termination availability of the analyst?

The many personal meanings notwithstanding, Craige tells us of the risks of the termination process and how a number of the termination goals and procedures are counterproductive and exacerbate problematic endings. These traditional goals and procedures, as Craige spells out, have been anchored in a Western cultural bias toward independence, emblematically expressed and furthered in Mahler's separation/individuation model. The traditional psychoanalytic goals of separation and independence dictates a procedure and criterion for a successful analysis called “radical separation,” that is, a termination with no further analytic contact. This model, in turn, pathologizes a person's request or need of their analyst post-termination. Craige points out that these traditional goals and technical procedures increase the risk of doing harm to analysands during and aft