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THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TERMINATION—AS A PHASE, A STATE, AND A SPECIAL treatment goal—in every analysis is by now very well established. So is the crucial importance of the management of termination in adolescent analyses as well as the links between termination and the normative processes undergone by the adolescent. These include the central position and multiple implications of the need to separate from early and current, preoedipal and postoedipal parental objects, as well as aspects of body and self that are ridden with infantile significance and attachment value. There is also no doubt whatsoever that the issue of termination in adolescent analysis—the "whether," "when," "how," and "what" would constitute a "good" or "bad" termination as well as the role played by varying ways of relating to and handling termination—that all of these are indeed valid and difficult clinical and technical problems, demanding our attention and consideration.
It seems to me, however, that by addressing ourselves so exclusively to these issues we are possibly falling short of some of the implications contained in Freud's monumental paper (1937). Freud chose as his title the terminability of psychoanalysis, and not its termination, with all the difference in nuance and implication contained in this wording. Although he touched briefly on some technical aspects of termination, he was not concerned, in the main, with questions of "when" and "how." Indeed, his focus and attention were shifted and transformed through the clinical facts of termination to the much wider vistas of the values, ideals, and evaluation contained in terminability ("the quality of … being terminable, i.e., capable of being or liable to be terminated"