Transference: Terminable, Interminable*

As soon as the words “terminable” and “interminable” are mentioned in the company of psychoanalysts, Freud's text “Analysis Terminable and Interminable” inevitably springs to mind. In the opening section of this text, Freud holds the Americans responsible for Rank's theory, which was supposed to make short analyses possible: “it was a child of its time, conceived under the stress of the contrast between the postwar misery of Europe and the ‘prosperity’ of America.” And he ends his introduction with the words: “The theory and practice of Rank's experiment are now things of the past - no less than American prosperity itself.” This was written soon after the great financial crisis in the United States. Since American prosperity has once again become a thing of the past, since the dollar no longer buys ten francs, and since Freud is therefore right once more, it seems to me that this question of the terminable and the interminable can now be reconsidered by directly posing the question of the end of analysis as the end of the transference. Can the transference come to an end, must it come to an end? But we should begin by asking what we mean by the word “transference.” We know how difficult it is to define it concisely, especially since it took on diverse meanings in Freud's oeuvre

To begin with, in its most obvious form the transference is the intensely affectionate attachment a patient has to his analyst, an attachment that assumes particular forms. Freud noticed that it involved the reproduction of childhood attachments. In the transference, the infantile is found to be repeated. But the role of the transference in the cure has to be considered, and from this standpoint,